History Lesson
Before we get onto the implications for N-Gage, here's a bit of history and clarification over what's going on.
There are actually three main stories today:
1) Nokia is going to buy the Symbian company, who make the Symbian operating system
Symbian was founded in 1998 by an alliance of mobile phone manufacturers including Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson (before they went into a joint venture with Sony), and the British personal organiser manufacturer Psion. Other phone makers including Samsung and Panasonic later bought shares in the company, and some non-shareholders bought licences to manufacture Symbian-compatible phones.
The idea of Symbian was to provide an operating system for pocket computers that had phones built into them, which are nowadays known as "smartphones". Symbian was also perhaps intended to stop Microsoft taking over the mobile computing world the way they took over the desktop computing world.
Nokia already owned about half of Symbian, but they're now buying all the other Symbian shares from the company's other owners.
2) A new organisation called the Symbian Foundation is to be created, which will unify all the various flavours of Symbian into one single platform (currently there are three: S60, UIQ and MOAP)
Due to disagreements over what kind of smartphones they wanted to make, the original founders of Symbian decided to produce several flavours of Symbian which would have the same operating system but different interfaces.
Ericsson (later to join forces with Sony to found Sony Ericsson) wanted to produce a touchscreen PDA-like device, whereas Nokia wanted to make normal-looking phones. Ericsson's devices used Symbian UIQ, while Nokia's used Symbian S60.
However, in the ten years since the founding of Symbian, both UIQ and S60 have started to overlap on each other's territory: S60 phones are about to get touchscreens, and some of the most recent UIQ phones are normal-looking non-touch models. It no longer makes any sense to have two separate versions of Symbian like this, which is why they're unifying them.
This means that all Symbian phones in the future will be compatible with each other, you won't have to worry about which kind of Symbian they use because there will only be one kind.
The original generation of N-Gage used the first version of Symbian S60, called S60v1, while the new N-Gage platform has the third version of Symbian S60, called S60v3.
3) Symbian is to be turned into an open source operating system
After Nokia buys Symbian, it's turning it over to a new organisation called the Symbian Foundation. They will be responsible for unifying the different kinds of Symbian (see above), and they will also make Symbian into an "open source" operating system.
"Open source" means that the inner workings of an operating system or program are available for the whole world to see and tinker with, and companies increasingly make their software open source so that they can collaborate with other companies and individuals on improving it. It saves time and money because everyone is working on the same product, so the product gets developed more quickly and easily.
Anyone can distribute or alter open source software, which makes it possible for competing versions to appear. This openness also usually makes the software more reliable and more secure because problems can be fixed as soon as they're spotted.
A group photo of some older Symbian-based phones. Note the N-Gage QD on the right, as the original generation of N-Gage used Symbian S60v1. The new N-Gage platform uses Symbian S60v3.
So, what does this mean for N-Gage?
Perhaps the most significant announcement today is the attempt to unify the different kinds of Symbian into one platform. It would theoretically allow N-Gage to spread to lots of non-Nokia phones, even phones in Japan which has previously been an N-Gage-free zone.
Why would Nokia want to do that though? Well, the main reason is that phones are getting very cheap very quickly. In 10 or 20 years time even advanced phones might be as cheap as pocket calculators are today, which would mean much less profit for the manufacturers.
To get round this problem, Nokia has recently said and done a lot to turn themselves into a software and internet service company. If they start making more money selling software than selling phones, then it would make perfect business sense to sell software (including N-Gage games) on non-Nokia devices. Unifying Symbian into one platform would help that tremendously.
So, if it's still around in a decade or two, N-Gage may become an internet service on a wide range of devices from many different manufacturers.
When will this unification happen?
We shouldn't get too excited right now though as the unification of Symbian isn't expected to happen before 2010.
And one little interesting game-related nugget about the Symbian Foundation...
The new Symbian Foundation website has a list of companies backing the new organisation, take a look at the name in the circle:
