The Nokia N96 smartphone has now gone on sale in Finland, and should be available elsewhere in Europe very soon. The N96 is N-Gage compatible, includes gaming keys and a graphics chip, and will apparently come with the N-Gage application built into its firmware so you can use it with the platform straight out of the box.
Read on in the full article.
On sale in the UK today too..
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum//forum/thread/76185/
Had an email from Nokia saying its available nationwide on the 1st of October.
Thanks for that, I've updated the main story on AAS and will get the AAN one altered after I write this.
It's funny, Verkkokauppa had the N96 listed as "2 to 4 weeks" yesterday, now they suddenly have loads of them. I bet they have had the N96 in stock for ages but had to wait until their sales embargo was lifted.
The person with the N96 in the link above says that the full version of Tetris came free with it.
On the one hand that makes sense as it's a very popular game with a wide appeal, but on the other it makes no sense at all because it's virtually identical to the Java version and doesn't show off any of the N-Gage's abilities.
A better free game might have been Creatures Of The Deep or Bounce.
Oh dear, someone at Nokia is an idiot. Apparently the N96 comes with THESE demos:
-World Series Of Poker
-Tetris
-Snakes Subsonic
-Mile High Pinball
-Asphalt 3
Where is COTD? Bounce? Reset Generation? Star Wars? System Rush? The N96 has 16 gigabytes of on-board storage, there's plenty of room for all the demos.
nokia sometimes dissapoint me!!!
stupid demos...
at least it doesn't have Brothers in Arms! lol
i would hate n-gage if only have BiA Demo lol
Lol, yeah, the BIA demo would have been an even worse decision, 20 seconds of gameplay followed by a "buy this game" message.
What the fuck? The person at Nokia really needs to get his brain examined!
The demos are supposed to be the hook. WSOP? Tetris? What the hell?
Top 5 games that should be preinstalled trials on any N-Gage phones firmware are:
Reset Generation
Bounce Boing Voyage
Star Wars the Force Unleashed
System Rush Evolution
Space Impact Kappa Base
Those 5 games really show the platforms capabilities in several ways! Other good choices are Dirk Dagger, Creatures of the Deep, Mile High Pinball and Pro Series Golf.
All the games mentioned above are excellent titles with a good trial time. BiA might be good but 20 secs? That put buyers off.
I suspect what happened was the person in charge of choosing demos didn't really know anything about N-Gage, and just picked five games that didn't go over the allocated size limit. The really good games tend to be 20 to 30 megabytes each, so five demos would be 100 to 150 megabytes in total, which is a lot more than the five games they actually used.
Although the N96 has 16gb on-board, it may be that Nokia wants to restrict how much of that is eaten up by the freebies that come with the phone. Apparently as well as the N-Gage demos there's also the complete film "Transformers" which must take up quite a bit of room if it's been encoded at a very high quality, and a lot of other stuff too.
But this is madness, they shouldn't have any preinstalled N-Gage demos at all if they're going to be the really bad games. It will just put people off downloading any more demos.
And choosing Tetris as the free game is stupid because it's identical to the Java version. Either they could have let people have the game of their choice, or one of the Nokia-published ones (except Snakes Subsonic which is terrible).
If they were worried about size they should have just put one or two good demos on there.
The only way it could have been worse is if they demos had included Dogz (worst game on N-Gage), Block Breaker (30 second demo) and BIA (20 second demo).
no hardware accelaration, no point to this phone...
the 3d hardware isnt used by any n-gage games - so it makes no difference
see this video showing N95 and N96 both playing the same game.
from my ongoing review blog...
http://hellon96.tumblr.com/
It will make very little difference even when the chip is used by N-Gage games, because there will be two versions written each optimised for a phone's abilities.
The version for phones without a chip will have less complex 3D textures and models but it will still play at a similar speed (compare the System Rush demo for the chip, and the actual game which doesn't use the chip, they look very similar and play at the same speed).
3D chips are just there to make 3D graphics look nicer, they're not required for gameplay at all.