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.