Will N-Gage be outdated before it arrives?

PS .. this is just a rant cos I cant play Poker against anyone on N-Gage yet haha

Yeah, I was a bit disappointed with the WSOP game too. They should have put SOME kind of multiplayer in it, it's so stupid that they didn't.

However, there's another poker game on the way to N-Gage called DChoc Hold Em Poker, which I think may have multiplayer capability. I'm not 100% sure though.

PaulyLaw wrote:You know the problem with waiting SO long for "long awaited" new technology after they start promoting it? That by the time it actually does arrive the market has moved on.

That can't happen because there's no such thing as N-gage technology.

This isn't a console launch, N-Gage is just a brand for games that run on Nokia smartphones. As the phones get better, so will the N-Gage games.

Because each Nokia smartphone is a bit better than the previous one, and because new models get released several times a year, the technology is constantly moving on.

It's like PC technology doesn't get outdated because new PCs are released all the time, each one a bit better than its predecessor.

Nokia's already said they're going to do two versions of some games, one that runs on all the phones and another that runs on the ones with 3D graphics accelerator chips. Eventually they will probably have those chips in all the phones, and the games will all look much better.

WAP? No, got fed up of waiting for any decent WAP services so I just used the web.

Erm... the N-gage compatible phones use the same brower as the iPhone. In fact they were using it way back in 2006, a year before the iPhone even existed.

DVB-H mobile TV? No, bored waiting for it. I've got YouTube, iPlayer, or even SlingPlayer now.

You can watch YouTube and other flash video sites on the latest N-Gage phones, because the browser has Flash Lite 3 support. That's an example of how the phones keep getting a bit better with every new release.

DVB-H is for people who don't want to pay data charges just to watch TV. Because DVB-H receives broadcast signals, there are no data charges as it doesn't use the internet. The other services you mention all require fast internet connections which may cost a lot on some phone networks.

N-Gage? Well it looked good, but as very casual gamer I got bored of waiting so just bought a couple of stand alone games and didn't get around to looking at N-Gage again.

Waiting for what, exactly?

There is no new N-Gage phone. The new N-Gage is a platform which runs on Nokia smartphones, and Nokia's smartphones are selling very well right now. People aren't buying the phones for games, they're buying them as phones, and the games will be a nice little bonus.

I know anyone reading this is probably not the normal user Nokia are gearing up for but I also know that the vast majority of people I know who own a Symbian based smartphone dont use it for anything more than calls and txts

Even if only 10% of all phone users buy games, that's still 200 million people worldwide and growing.

There are about 2 billion people who use mobile phones, one in three people on the planet. That's more than all consoles and PCs and music players put together.

There are over 1 billion new phones sold every year, so lots of people are upgrading their handsets quite often. Eventually handsets will probably all be smartphones of some kind, and capable of running a service like N-Gage.

Even if N-Gage disappeared, services like it will probably become the main gaming platform in the future. I'm pretty certain that the future of gaming is on the mobile phone.

I wasn't refering to the abilities of the various Nokia models to run the technology mention, I was refering to the technology itself.

WAP was heralded as the big mobile innovation for a while, but just never took off because it got overtaken by full web browsers running on mobile devices. DVB-H could well find itself being substituted by youtube and other similar applications before it even finds it way into daily life.

My point was that if N-Gage as a brand, technology, platform or whatever you want to refer to it as doesn't want to miss out on the first impressions impact of all those users out there it better get a move on and appear to be more that a half baked idea that doesn't deleiver substance to the hype.

oh .. and I still can't play poker against anyone yet!!! haha

PaulyLaw wrote:I wasn't refering to the abilities of the various Nokia models to run the technology mention, I was refering to the technology itself.

That's my point though, there is no such thing as N-Gage technology. You can't talk about it becoming outdated because it doesn't exist.

N-Gage is just a brand name for games that run on Nokia smartphones. The only technology is whatever the smartphones use, and as that changes the games will change too to keep up with it.

WAP was heralded as the big mobile innovation for a while, but just never took off because it got overtaken by full web browsers running on mobile devices. DVB-H could well find itself being substituted by youtube and other similar applications before it even finds it way into daily life.

True, but what's that got to do with N-Gage?

My point was that if N-Gage as a brand, technology, platform or whatever you want to refer to it as doesn't want to miss out on the first impressions impact of all those users out there

First impressions are important on consoles because the whole point of a console is to play games. If people don't like the games, they don't buy the console. But that isn't the case with the new N-Gage because most people would probably have bought their particular phone model anyway for other reasons.

For example the N95 and N73 are N-Gage compatible but they had already sold tens of millions before N-Gage was even announced.

Most people aren't going to buy N-Gage phones for N-Gage, they're buying them as phones. The N-Gage service is just one part of a whole package, like the wines in a restaurant. You might enjoy the wine in a restaurant, and it might greatly enhance the overall experience, but that's unlikely to be the main reason you go there.