Nokia Debuts N-Gage
- February 05, 2003 15:46 PM PST
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The European cell-phone manufacturer shows off its combo mobile handset and game system at an event in London.
Nokia Corp. entered the games market Wednesday with the launch of its N-Gage device, a combination games console and cell phone, at tandem press conferences in London and Sydney, Australia.The N-Gage, which Nokia prefers you call a "game deck" instead of a handheld system, is a gaming device with a decidedly cell-phone bent in its feature list. It's shaped kind of like a Game Boy Advance, with more buttons for all the phone functions, and it's got a backlit 176x208 pixel screen that's capable of displaying up to 4096 colors at once. Besides all this, though, it's got a full range of PDA-style features?MP3 playback, built-in FM radio, email, instant messenging, XHTML web browsing, and more. The system has 64 megabytes of memory built in to store all this stuff.
Games for Nokia's system will be made available on special memory packs, called MultiMedia Cards (MMCs), sold separately at Nokia outlets. A total of 10 N-Gage MMCs are slated to go on sale with the system, including Tomb Raider from Eidos, MotoGP from THQ, a Sonic the Hedgehog title from Sega, and several Nokia-produced originals. The system can also play the Java games currently available on color handsets today; these can be stored in the N-Gage's onboard memory, while the MMC games cannot.
To the gamer, though, the most innovative feature in the N-Gage is its wireless multiplayer compatibility. The system can deal with two types of multiplayer gaming: up to two players within a single room, and online with the rest of the world. The former uses the Bluetooth standard for minimum latency, while the latter will use GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) connectivity to allow multiplayer online gaming.
"The Nokia N-Gage brings the start of a whole new gaming experience to the market," Nokia vice president Anssi Vanjoki said at the London conference. "Nokia is working with world-renowned game publishers, including Activision, Eidos, Sega, Taito and THQ, and developers to provide an appealing and balanced catalogue of high quality games to the marketplace... With these building blocks in place, the Nokia N-Gage platform will help to unleash the creative and innovative spirit of the games industry."
The N-Gage and its games will be available at all Nokia outlets worldwide sometime in the fourth quarter of 2003. Nokia gave no word on prices, saying only that the consoles will cost less than 500 euros (about $539) and that pricing for the copyright-protected MMCs has yet to be decided. When asked about sales expectations, vice president Vanjoki said only that Nokia does not launch products unless it expects to sell millions of units. Hmm.
