The Great Gaming Gulf

Why do people wax lyrical about touch phones? You cannot see or touch anything on a bright day and who wants smudgy fingers all over the screen when gaming?.
'Nought wrong with buttons' as they say up north. Virtual Pool Mobile is at its most responsive and playable on a button enabled Nokia. Try the game on a HTC Touch HD, it's a joke and if the screen re-orientates automatically the game has no idea what's going on. Touch enabled screens is marketing hype and everyones falling for it...I could go on.

Great article, my thoughts:

I bought a n95-8gb around okt -08, I used to have the orginal ngage and liked the games ( for its time ) so when I looked up the internet and saw all the opengles demos for ngage on n93, I was sold. Surely the iphone was already out but the n95-8gb is a far better allrounder and has hardware buttons for games ( n95 media buttons can also be used ). Both I was in a big suprise when I started playing around with the n95. First off system rush demo "this looks great ", so I downloaded the ngage client + the orginal ngage demo " mmm no opengles mmm".

As I understood nokia stated in March 08 that opengles was in the pipeline for the SDK, but more and more phones nokia released didn;t had the 3d hardware accell chips. So I could already see the not so bright future for my nokia. In feb 09 I sold my n95 and got a iphone, what a pleasent suprise, so many good games all opengles, in all honesty having no hardware buttons can be a issue for some games but most games can be easily played without those, besides that the n95-8gb d-pad didn;t felt very good.

All in all I still feel the n95-8gb is a better all-round phone, but the iphone has just such a great support from developers ( from indie to capcom/ ea etc ) that if you are into gaming the iphone cannot be overlooked.

I was thinking of buying a omnia HD, but I learned from the past buying a great phone with great specs but no developer supporting it ( I had a dell axim/ o2 xda flame / n95-8gb )

sorry for my bad english

Why do people wax lyrical about touch phones? You cannot see or touch anything on a bright day and who wants smudgy fingers all over the screen when gaming?.
'Nowt wrong with buttons' as they say up north. Virtual Pool Mobile is at its most responsive and playable on a button enabled Nokia. Try the game on a HTC Touch HD, it's a joke and if the screen re-orientates automatically the game has no idea what's going on. Touch enabled screens is marketing hype and everyones falling for it...I could go on.

its even more sad when you compare the same game on both phones.
ex. need for speed :undercover
the iphone version looks and play 3x better than the n-gage version AND costs 1/3 the price.
nokia is obviously only going after the casual gamer and trying to save a buck on the cpu at the same time.

Well, as the 90% of Nokia's output is QVGA crap...

I find N-gage games enough for as a time killer. I love the fact that I can use my Nokia on a long trip without having to worry about the battery life. I agree Iphone has better graphics and excellent accelerometer feel. I despise the fact that N-gage is not supported on the e71 and 5800.
I get disappointed when it comes to developers selling an app/game for $1 on the Iphone and $10-35 on the s60 or Wm platforms. Maybe these developers want to chase users towards the iphone.

The new Ovi Store will help monetise what developers produce in similar fashion to the Apple iPhone App Store, so here at least there's some content and some momentum

The success of Ovi store depends on people spending their money to buy apps and games. But believe me, people won't buy if you sell sh*t. The games on the ipoo (yeah, i hate apple) are far better than anything available on Symbian, that's the reason why people buy it.

I hope better sense prevails and Nokia gets its act together before its too late.

nokia = fail

apple's first phone. and look what happened. everyone pissed their pants. and none of them are able to catch up

Comments like these are what's fuelling nokia to keep on mucking around what they're doing already..

games ARE an essential part of any smartphone, especially those based around info-tainment ala N-Series. only a handful of games are ok on the n-gage/symbian platform. If Symbian is to succeed, they need proper SDKs, and 3d chips in their devices. Nokia is hurting both themselves, symbian, and other symbian developers like samsung, who try to be innovative, and push hardware boundaries forward as seen with the 8510 an 8910, yet nokia keeps on producing crap hardware, and holds others back.. N97 is a perfect example. You can yap all you want about how software matters, but guess what, software NEEDS hardware to run on! there are only so many apps you can do with a single core ARM. Nokia needs to get their heads outta their arses and face the reality, making a phone that's only good enough to run your firmware and some small apps is not enough. iPhone has proved this.Multitasking, camera, etc although I for one need them, is not enough to hold people from buying an iphone, as we've seen already. An excellent Appstore, and SDK for devs is what makes a phone successful. Everything from nokia is half assed compared to apple.

I know a lot of people who refrained from buying nintendo DS'es or PSPs and went for an ipod touch instead since they found the games were very good, had excellent internet and music capabilities and was more fun and intuitive to play with than a psp whilst having much better graphics than a DS.

tell me, how many intuitive apps does symbian have? I'm currently stocking up on S60v5 apps for when I get the omnia HD, I've only managed to find so many apps ( 40 to be exact, including games, apps and other utilities).

Besides having 3d hardware acceleration, don�t forget what makes the iphone/itouch viable has gaming platform is multitouch - that�s the the only way it can compensate the lack of physical buttons (untill a gaming accessory comes out with 3.0 lol)...even if the 5800 had the same graphical power, without multitouch it would be severely handicaped

wouldn't take it as a surprise if they make a gamepad for it, given the support for external devices in 3.0

I agree multitouch is an essential part of gaming without keys, although the omniaHD has shown us games like kroll that don't need such a thing. But this is only one in a million.. multitouch is one of the reasons gaming on an iphone is so fun.

I would hardly argue that "everyone pissed their pants" as someone put it, and I'm sure that Nokia certainly didn't.

While Steve has a point about the range of games being better on the Apple App Store, there is one MASSIVE fly in the ointment, as I discovered recently. Recently, while staying with my wife's family in Madrid, I decided to buy a game for my iPod Touch from the App Store, using my brother-in-law's WiFi connection. No problem you would have thought. Unfortunately, my iPod was quite full, so there was not enough space to install the game. Still not a problem, you would think. However, in their infinite wisdom, Apple have decided that you can not delete music or photos from the iPod itself, only using iTunes; being away from home, this was not an option. I presume the same limitation (Apple fanboys call this a "feature" BTW) applies to the iPhone.

On virtually any device apart from those produced by Apple, the user has total control over what apps, photos, music videos etc. are installed on the device, and can uninstall/delete them whenever they feel like. So, despite Apple's overblown hype about how "the iPhone is the most powerful phone ever", "we've invented the mobile internet" etc., it seems that they consider it to be a PC peripheral rather than a powerful device in its own right.... very strange.

Still agree with Steve re. the quality of games though....

uhh... you can delete your videos & photos, just not all at one time. Music is another thing..

I have to agree, I recently got a few paid games for my iPod touch. Initially I tried out the free ones and determined that they were all crap and 5 months since I got my touch I have just been using it as an music/video player. I got Need for Speed undercover and I was amazed at the controls, the refresh rate or smoothness, it really worked well as a game, I was dubious as it had no buttons but it works really well. I also tried Enigmo and thats a good game as well where resolution graphic detail is important. I have played ngage games on my N82, I admit I don't have a big screen so not sure if comparison is fair. Playing Bouce was good but refresh rate was slow, graphics were not as clear as the iPhone, for what it was I was happy because it's as much as I had expected from a phone, but now that I have something to compare it to, things are not looking too good.

As Steve has said, which I too agree my N82 will still remain as my phone, there are many thing I do which are more important than games, GPS garmin/tomtom, video recording, photos, oh and there also the price of the iPhone, I can't justify the contract price, even though I spent �250 on an iPod touch.

What about the effects of competition, piracy, and portability?

Because there are so many games for the iPhone, competition is fierce and this results in better games.

Because it is much harder to run cracked iPhone apps compared to cracked Symbian apps, developers will sell more iPhone copies of their games than Symbian copies.

Because apps in general on iPhone are not bound to an IMEI or something like that, you can take your games with you to a new device. People know that their apps won't become obsolete when they move to a new device, making them more willing to spend the money in the first place.

This is not just a problem with games on S60, it's a problem with 3rd party applications on S60 in general.

I was a PalmOS (PDA) user from 1998 to 2005. Even in 1998, there were thousands and thousands of 3rd party applications available for PalmOS. But then the smartphones started taking over - they had much bigger market share. So, eventually, I jumped ship and bought a Nokia N93 when it first came out. I was sorely dissapointed when I realised the dismal state of 3rd party applications for S60. Despite S60 having a much larger market share than PalmOS ever dreamt of having, PalmOS had several times more applications available. Why is that? I have a theory.

I think the problem is that Nokia is a phone company first and foremost. Although they call their devices "multimedia platform" and whatnot, they still basically consider it to be a phone with some extra bells and whistles. Therefore, they don't market their phones enough as being able to install 3rd party applications. Back in 2005, I used to listen to a Nokia podcast called "Voice of S60", where the host used to interview Nokia employees. At the end of the interviews, he always used to ask them which applications they had installed on their own S60 phones. It turned out that most of them had only installed the Nokia podcasting application, and nothing else. If even Nokia's own employees in important positions don't install applications on their S60 phones, how can Nokia expect their consumers to do so?. That is why Nokia never realised the potential of 3rd party applications until Apple came along and showed them what was possible with the iPhone.

Then, there's also the problem that S60 allegedly sucks as a development platform. I haven't coded in C++ on S60 myself so I can't be sure, but I've read about many developers giving up on the platform because it's so cumbersome to develop for. I take it that's not the case for the iPhone.

Do you guys remember what we said before N-Gage (the latest generation) came out? People said it would suck compared to PSP and Nintendo DS, but we said, "ah, but the N-Gage platform has one advantage that the PSP and Nintendo DS doesn't - it's always connected to the Internet. There will be lots and lots of online multiplayer games for N-Gage". Unfortunately, these games never showed up. Reset generation is a brilliant exception though, showing how to take advantage of the N-Gage format. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to get the number of sales it deserves.

I predict that Nokia will lose a lot of market share for high end devices to Apple, when us techies begin to realise how much more powerful the iPhone really is when it comes to software. Sure, the iPhone is way behind (no cut & paste, no video recording, no MMS, and so on) but for how long do you think that will be the case? The iPhone is maturing, and when it does, Nokia's high end devices are in trouble.

And no, I'm not an iPhone fanboi. I'm still using my beat-up old Nokia N93 from 2005, and I have a N97 on preorder. But I'm torn on that preorder - I really like the N97's keyboard, but damn it those iPhone applications are sexy!

Hi all,

Just to give a developper perspective.

Having a friend earning money with an app on the appstore, i decided i should put my developping skills in the mobile world. Since I languish on the N97 I look at both nokia and Iphone scene.

Publishing on AppStore :
- Open to anyone
- 99$ for life as many apps as you want, free update as well
- Only one hardware to support on the 26 millions handset(iphone - ipod touch)

Publishing on Ovi :
Open to companies only, individual need to create a companie
50$ subscription
200$ per year
20$ per application + 20$ per update
Each application must be signed : 200$ more
600 type of devices to support

There is no way to propose a freeware in these conditions. And it will be very hard to break even with a 0.99$ app.

That's very sad, as I'm sure I'll love my n97. But I'm on my way to make money on the iphone !

Please Nokia wake up. Apple did very well, just copycat the experience !!

Yahel wrote:
Publishing on Ovi :
Open to companies only, individual need to create a companie
50$ subscription
200$ per year
20$ per application + 20$ per update
Each application must be signed : 200$ more
600 type of devices to support

There is no way to propose a freeware in these conditions. And it will be very hard to break even with a 0.99$ app.

What? Are you joking? Is this really true? How can they possibly be so clueless? Most 3rd party applications in this world are written by some guy in a garage somewhere, not by companies! Looking back to my PalmOS days, all the most popular applications (DateBk for example) were written by one guy in his spare time! If you eliminate all those applications, only a fraction will remain!

It looks like I'll have to investigate getting an iPhone, which saddens me because I like Nokia's devices.

uhh... you can delete your videos & photos, just not all at one time. Music is another thing..

I believe that you can delete videos on the device itself, but not music or photos. So it's still a crap decision by Apple, and potentially seriously reduces the attractiveness of the App Store, unless you're happy to leave a few 100MB free just in case; very lame...

While I do agree with this post, I*still love playing quake 2 on my n95 8gb hooked up to a bluetooth. And while it�s not so much fun to play quake 3 is at least proof that nokia can do 3d graphics too.

I�ll just a few games that are as good as anything on the iphone/ipod touch:
Quake 3, Quake 2, Quake 1, Doom, Rise of the triad, ScummVM(This really opens up alot of potential time waste),
Gpfce(Excellent free Nintendo 8-bit emulator, againt. massive potential)
Also. Except from scummvm all these games show how buttons are definitely not a thing of the past.

sorry...doubt any of the fps you mentioned is better controlled on a phone keypad than on a multitouch screen

just see how beautifully wolfenstein 3d official port controls on the iphone/itouch, actually emulating mouse and keyboard control

I�ll just a few games that are as good as anything on the iphone/ipod touch:
Quake 3, Quake 2, Quake 1, Doom, Rise of the triad, ScummVM(This really opens up alot of potential time waste),
Gpfce(Excellent free Nintendo 8-bit emulator, againt. massive potential)
Also. Except from scummvm all these games show how buttons are definitely not a thing of the past.

You clearly haven't gamed on the iPhone / iPod if you believe that these games come close to what is on offer on the App Store. Also the iPhone with it's multitouch controls can give a more analog type control system for 3D games which is vastly better than a digital D pad.

I tried wolf 3d on my ipod touch. It�s better on the n95.
You set it up so that you turn and move forward and backwards with the d-pad. Strafe left and right with 4 and 6 and shoot with 5. It works very well. same with doom and quake. Although quake was originally designed with a mouse in mind. So you run into problems with aiming up and down.

Another point that certainly doesn't help Nokia's fight for better hardware is all the N97 fanboys arguing for it's meager CPU speed and RAM. It'd be one thing if Nokia released a phone that plays games poorly and everyone complained, but instead you get a line of people ready to defend it because they don't game and don't think it matters.

I very well might end up with the next gen iPhone after all. The lack of development and lack of tools to improve the development on S60 is very disheartening, especially for potential Samsung i8910 owners who may never see the full capabilities of its hardware.

I tried wolf 3d on my ipod touch. It�s better on the n95.
You set it up so that you turn and move forward and backwards with the d-pad. Strafe left and right with 4 and 6 and shoot with 5. It works very well. same with doom and quake. Although quake was originally designed with a mouse in mind. So you run into problems with aiming up and down.

Yes so as you admit you cannot play a proper FPS where you have to aim in the vertical space as well as the horizontal on your N95 but that's not an issue on the iPhone / iPod...

On the iphone I*run into problems just walking around.
On wolf3d you can�t even strafe with the standard setup. If you change it so that you can strafe you need 3 fingers to walk, turn and shoot. I*just couldn�t get comfortable. But hey. Maybe I*could get used to it. I*agree the iphone is a great gaming device. Better than s60 for the most part.
But not for fps games. At least the wolf 3d controlls didn�t impress me. And did I*mention that you can hook up a bluetooth mouse and keyboard and play quake pc style?

svdwal wrote:What about the effects of competition, piracy, and portability?

Because there are so many games for the iPhone, competition is fierce and this results in better games.

Because it is much harder to run cracked iPhone apps compared to cracked Symbian apps, developers will sell more iPhone copies of their games than Symbian copies.

Enfors wrote:What? Are you joking? Is this really true? How can they possibly be so clueless? Most 3rd party applications in this world are written by some guy in a garage somewhere, not by companies! Looking back to my PalmOS days, all the most popular applications (DateBk for example) were written by one guy in his spare time! If you eliminate all those applications, only a fraction will remain!

Unregistered wrote:Yes so as you admit you cannot play a proper FPS where you have to aim in the vertical space as well as the horizontal on your N95 but that's not an issue on the iPhone / iPod...

One problem with mobile games IMO is that it's pretty much just towards the causual players. The vast majority of mobile games are just puzzle games or racing games. You run thru a session of Tetris, a level or drive a race, and that's it. Those games can be fun sometimes, and have their moments but it's not something that works in the long run, at least not for me.

There is a serious lack of mobile games that have a story & gameplay depth. The original N-Gage had a few of those, like Rifts, but there simply aren't any of those anymore. When I spend 4+ hours on the train (which happens fairly often), I either sleep or play on the DS. I wish I could play on the phone instead, one device less to carry :tongue:

I wish there were some phone game developers that put focus on good story RPGs instead of Bejeweled/Racing clones. And with turn-based combat, the clunky phone keypad controls doesn't really matter much. So yeah, the best thing Nokia could do to make N-Gage attractive to me is to release Rifts for it again 😛

I'm getting quite disillusioned with Nokia of late. I've had the N82 4 almost 2 years now n I still dont feel like 'upgrading'. The 5800 excites me at 1st but reports of its mediocre gaming ability killed the excitement. The N97 has also lost its lustre on me. There are a lot of gaming freaks out there among Nokia users but their needs are not being catered 2. U dont need 2 compare ngage with iphone, just compare some of the games with its .sis brethren n you'll see how crappy ngage is. With the exception of One, COTD, Reset Generation, none of the others r worth mentioning 4 me. Most of the latest releases r nothing but rehash of the sis n java versions. The N82 itself is a pretty competent gaming machine. The Quake games work well, u just need 2 setup the controls properly. I compared the graphics accelerated sis version of crash nitrokart with the iphone version the other day n they looked just the same 2 me. It shows that Nokia is more than capable of coming up with the hardware but they aren't n there r also no games available anyway. I dont know, if thgs dont change by the end of ths year, I think I might just get an Iphone.

Just found out about Zenonia for iPhone. In my opinion, that's exactly the kind of game that the N-Gage needs, and it doesn't have to be in 3D, obviously, since it's a 2D game.