N-Gage 2 Announced

Team Rocket Elite writes "According to Gamesindustry.biz Nokia's at it again. They plan to make it more like a normal phone and to fix the issues with changing games and using it as a phone. From the article: 'Nokia is planning a major press event on April 14, which will probably feature the first look at the new device.'"

Comments

A resounding "meh"

[Naffer]

Sure, a phone that plays video games is a nice idea, but it probably doesn't work all that well in practice. I've got a flip phone that I've had for just about a year. I've dropped it, scratched it, and subjected it to all manner of abuse. It sits in my pocket and gets slammed into walls and sat on. I don't carry my GBA everywhere because I don't need it everywhere.
In all honestly if I'm going to carry around an expensive phone with extra features, I'd rather have a phone with a really kick-ass internet browser. I'd love to be able to look stuff up when I'm on the go without having to screw around with mobile sites. WAP doesn't do anything for me.

Re:A resounding "meh"

[obeythefist]

I've got a 3G smartphone, a Motorola A920. The phone is great. I've installed java games, I use Opera to read books in HTML, I keep a few MP3's to listen to, I can take photos and pretty much anything else you might want to do. The only thing missing is a TV tuner.

The reason I got a smartphone instead of a PDA is that I carry my phone around everywhere, always. It makes sense to. It doesn't make sense to try and juggle a PDA and a phone and a gameboy and a camera around. So games might be better/easier on the dedicated hardware of a gameboy, but I guarantee if I owned both, the games on my phone would get much more playtime, because I have it with me, always. This is why eventually Nokia have a good chance of succeeding.

Likewise, in case you think web browsing on a phone is cool, I have to tell you it is. But 3 charges me 1c/kb downloaded. So it's absolutely prohibitive to even bother despite the fact that I'm carrying Opera in my pocket. Maybe in the future web browsing will happen. The technology is there, but there's more greed than need.

Handheld only maybe?

[SphericalCrusher]

Why don't they just make an all out handheld console? They already have enough phones... no one wants to play games on their cellphone. And if they do, why not just port games to the cellphone?

Anyhow, they aren't going to win with Nintendo even if they make a handheld console, shaped like a phone, that plays games...

Re:Handheld only maybe?

[gauauu]

See, I don't agree. As much as I think the first NGage was a waste, I was thinking yesterday, and I would be incredibly happy if my GBA-SP functioned as a phone also.

I think people would love a phone/gaming device, if and only if it was actually good at doing both.

(I know I would)

And an A for expediency

[cgenman]

They went from Announcement to Failure to Sequel in just over a year.

It's almost like mid 90's SEGA.

Re:Tenacious Finns

[gl4ss]

the name has to resemble n-gage for the sake of making game compatibility obvious.

plus, this new version, being mostly of the same internals can't have been that expensive for them to develop(heck, n-gage itself is basically just stuff they had already developed hacked together.)

though imho they should have made 6600&all that are capable(hardware wise) of playing the n-gage games to be able to do so without having to jump through hoops(getting cracks).

some of the best stuff available are not official n-gage titles anyways(note: you can sell garage titles that are 100% legal, unlike with gameboy and with nintendos exclusivity to cart making). there's quite a lot good stuff that's shareware/trial distributed, like sky force .