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N-Gage QD Review - No More Side-Talkin'
jasoncart writes "After the apparently poor uptake, and questionable design of the original N-Gage, have Nokia taken the hint when designing the next model - the N-Gage QD? Ferrago has a hands-on review."
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Another games reviewer here. Got mine yesterday morning from the lovely PR people. It's a much nicer bit of kit than the original - almost all the design flaws are sorted and fixed, and there appears to be a wave of halfdecent games on the way.
I wrote a postmortem of the original N-Gage [google cache] which details what the QD fixes - I would add though that the QD is by no means a 'small' phone, it's almost the width of an old Nokia 1610!
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
You may laugh, but nokia's official featurelist for the Ngage now includes "sidetalkin'"!
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
... I am a little sceptic to the new design.
Yep, I'm using an NGage. Not because of the gaming stuff (which does increase the gadget value) but because it has a lot of nice features and was cheap to buy. It works both in Europe and the US, it's got Bluetooth and runs Symbian applications. Most of all, I really appreciate the radio function and being able to record songs I like when I hear them.
Though I also find it funny, I have never experienced the "Dumbo effect". The phone comes with a nice handsfree and if that's not cool enough, you can always go for a Bluetooth headset.
Personally, I wouldn't buy the new phone and I think Nokia is shooting themselves in the foot beleiving people will buy a phone only for the gaming capabilities.
The loading times issue is actually quite interesting. In order to save money on the MMC card, some games are compressed. Sonic N loads straight away, it's not compressed. Tomb Raider and Pandemonium have loading times, they are compressed -- to just below 8MB if memory serves. If you compare the loading times of, say, TR to Crazy Taxi on the GBA (which is quite a technical marvel), they are roughly the same.
They didn't design it like you suggested because you have more clue than Nokia
While that's an easy stance to take, I feel I should point out that the 6800 series of phones are also built by Nokia. Therefore someone in Nokia must have a clue, it just doesn't appear to be the ones who designed the N-Gage.
Perhaps the real problem with the N-GAGE form factor is that Nokia tried to pack too much stuff into it. The N-GAGE does games, Java, MP3s, Radio, Bluetooth, IR, and a bunch of other junk all while trying to be a phone. At the very least, the standard battery simply wouldn't be powerful enough for more than a half-hour of game time. A single game could result in serious draw by the following devices:
- Main CPU
- Bluetooth processor
- 3D GPU
- FM Digital Signal Processor
- LCD Color Display
- Standby GSM communications
Between all of those, I wouldn't be surprised if the power draw was somewhere around 3-10 Watts! ("Standby" power draw of a phone is usually less than a Watt.) You'd need a Laptop battery to power the thing for any appreciable amount of time. If Nokia had simply scaled back the device in a few areas, they might have had a good shot at a first gen device. Instead they overengineered it and guaranteed failure.
BTW, I think I know why you have to remove the battery to change the game. The Nokia engineers were probably stumped by the issue of making the user reboot the handheld before changing the cartrige. Game systems like the NES and Gameboy would actually lock the cartrige when they were turned on. Nokia's solution was to instead force people to remove the battery. This guarantees that the phone will be shut off when the cartriges are swapped and circumvents the requirement for a mechanical switch to lock the cartrige. It was still a dumb idea.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
*****The QD could be a really interesting product if they used the synergy effects created by merging a phone with a mobile game system. For instance, Bluetooth would be a great, albeit power-consuming, way to implement multiplayer games. The same goes for location-based or WAP stuff.*****
How can this guy even be a +1? Obviously he isn't even a real tester because if he's been playing a QD how can you miss the BLARRINGLY OBVIOUS MULTIPLAYER OPTION OVER BLUETOOTH
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean