In All About Symbian Insight 63 (AAS Podcast 120) we briefly cover the N-Gage news out of GDC (1 million profiles, accelerometer Bounce and device support). Steve and Rafe mull over the importance of the underlying changes in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, before chatting about the importance of homescreens, with reference to TouchWiz on the Omnia HD. You can listen to AAS Insight 64 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
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Great Podcast guys, as usual. Enjoyed listening to this while eating breakfast. It is indeed ashame about the N73 not being up to the mark with N-Gage, particularly after the publicity this great little device gave feature N-gage in the early days.
Keep up the good work fella's.!
Very good show, specially the part comparing ngage and the iphone games scene...there�s really no contest.
Today once again, another sign of that, Gameloft releases another crappy made game on Ngage, while its Iphone counterpart is amazing (Real Football). And they�ve been doing this in almost every single game. This is how publishers see Ngage.
Great podcast, really enjoyed the mix of hardware and software discussions. Few of points touched upon:
Steve - the NGage pitched as a premium gaming solution? A gaming solution sure, but first I'd ever heard about it being premium. Sure it has the potential to produce premium quality games if the power of Symbian was harnessed... but we've never seen this.
Rafe - plaudits to Ngage for its ease of use? Are you freebasing or am I alone in a parallel universe where the Ngage client is one of the clunkiest, nastiest, POS's ever to be foisted on the user. OK maybe that's a bit harsh, I'm sure downloading a game using it is slightly more convenient that downloading it of the web using the S60 browser. But finding the game in the first place, or finding something worth playing...?
E75 - the new messaging client. Does this have support for SMS? I spoke to the Nokia Messaging guys at CES in January, and again last week as part of their market research. They said that the E75 would either have or be getting this functionality.
Homescreens - this seem to be a circular occurance, in that bespoke operator homescreens become the in-thing, then the masses scream for a return to vanilla screens. Last time I think the big uproar was when Orange poured their vertical 'crossbar' homescreen over S60, Windows Mobile devices etc. circa 2005?
What's any different this time round? What's going to prevent users having the same reaction when Vodafone or anyone else bring out their S60 v5 homescreens widgetted-up to the nines with shortcuts to their services? Sure the technology may have moved on and hopefully will be more stable and faster reacting that the last time network screens gained notoriety... but do users REALLY want this?
Or maybe it's like the Matrix or Battlestar Galactica - it's happened before, it will happen again?