Nokia to shut down N-Gage

First it was a phone, then an online service. Now, Nokia's N-Gage will soon be nothing at all. The Finnish phone giant is going to shut it down. The N-Gage site will continue through 2010, but it will feature no new games. Instead, they'll be sold through Nokia's Ovi online store. It's hard to see the move is coincidental to …

[Benedict]

title...

I once saw one of these in 2003. Never seen one since.

[Anonymous Coward]

Said it before, I'll say it again

Nokia should focus on what they're good at, hardware.

Their phone's software and supporting software is always shit. I can't think of a decent piece of Nokia software. Only amongst Nokia customers is it normal to regularly upgrade the phone's firmware.

The only decent thing they ever released was the S80 contacts and calendar packages - on one phone.

[Jimmy Floyd]

Trashbat-dot-cock

I can't help but be reminded of the phone from the comical 'Nathan Barley' series, the Wasp T12 Speechtool (with a outsized number 5 on the keypad, because "that's the most commonly used number"):

http://www.trashbat.co.ck/

[Paul Hates Handles]

FINALLY!

Finally these pieces of crap can die!

[Thomas Bottrill]

I had an N-Gage

I won it from one of those Sky channels in the 200s. I kept it for about three years before it broke (the microphone only intermittently worked), and I quite liked it.

Though Nokia really gave up on it quite early on.

[Ivor Biggen]

@Jimmy Floyd

Surely its 7 and not 5

[James Le Cuirot]

@Benedict

Heh same here. And I didn't think much of it then either. The mother of the boy who owned it got all defensive when she noticed that I wasn't impressed. *lol*

[goggyturk]

Maemo

That's because the future of Nokia's gaming / multimedia / Facebitch / Twatter / mobile internet effort is going to centre around the Maemo platform.

Got a n810 myself, and it's rather useful and nifty, with or without a mobile phone.

Pity the fuckers aren't going to release the next version of Maemo for it, hence the fail, but I'm sure I'll still be using it into the forseeable future,

[Andy 73]

@Said it before, I'll say it again

"Nokia should focus on what they're good at, hardware."

The point is that the first N-Gage, and indeed it's sequel demonstrated that outside of their comfort zone, they're not that good at hardware or ergonomics at all.

The original announcement had much to properly scare Nintendo - a company with loads of experience in producing competitively priced hand held consumer electronics that sold in hundreds of millions was going to produce a games platform. More than Sony, Microsoft or just about anyone else, they should have had the skills to produce something to rival the best that Nintendo could produce.

Instead we got the N-Gage, which was so clearly unsuited to mobile gaming and was badly compromised as a phone. It's true that the desperate attempt at leveraging old-school mobile phone economics against gaming had a big part to play (what's that coming over the hill? It's the iPhone!), but the phone that they released showed exactly where they were heading and the gaming community weren't fooled.

If the hardware had been up to scratch, we might have seen some killer titles, but it was a disaster.

[Sir Sham Cad]

@AC 12:55

"Only amongst Nokia customers is it normal to regularly upgrade the phone's firmware."

*coughiPhonecough*

Still, the point about the software stands. At least the first version of software shipping with a new Nokia phone is buggy and slow. Same as with my old Sony Ericsson T610, actually. No, that was worse. Maybe it's just that these shiny new things are rushed to market before the competition releases their shiny new thing like just about everything in the history of consumer technology ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bing, Bing

Bing goes N-Gage

(is this working? Am I managing to steer the use of the word bing away from anything that would please microsoft?)

[Tom 11]

@ AC (2nd post)

Actually, the dev tools they keep to themselves are pretty mega, had a movie converter from some ex dev, it was the absolute nuts!

[Barney Carroll]

@AC 12:55

Strongly disagree.

Their basic phones have incredibly intuitive software that, when it comes to the basics (of what mobiles phones were meant to do), always give you quick access to the options you want in any given circumstance.

Their word processing software is the best there is.

That said, n-gage was utterly ridiculous from the start. It tried to be a phone and a console, and achieved below mediocrity in both camps, at every iteration. On top of that, the hardware was ugly — and the whole package was counter-intuitive in almost every aspect. It just doesn't fit with the nokia brand as I perceive it in any way.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember nokia

they used to make great phones, then less great phones, they were crap at apps. Now they're a patent troll, i think

[Annonymous Howard]

i liked them

I still have my old ngage, and i love it.

I still have it as my backup phone... when my iphone/n97/e65 decide not to play the game, i break out the phone built for games :)

[fluffy]

I had an N-Gage QD

it was a decent Symbian phone, although its J2ME really sucked for games (ironically), and it worked fine for me up until the day it bricked itself because it ran out of memory and got stuck in a perpetual reboot loop with no way to fix it aside from sending it in to Nokia with a check for $28 to flash the firmware. I opted not to.