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Nokia Declares N-Gage A Failure
chrisbtoo writes "Nokia's VP of corporate strategy has admitted that the company's ill-fated N-Gage was not the success they'd hoped it would be, and they won't develop the platform further. The device sold 2 million units in 3 years, against projections of 6 million. They'll continue to build the gaming software into their Series 60 phones, but gaming won't be a priority for them until 2007." From the article: "The company launched the N-Gage in 2003 but sales have been disappointing and, according to the company's roadmap, mobile gaming will not be a focus until 2007. Nokia is concentrating on mobile music for the rest of this year, and next year's main push will be on driving mobile television."
I think the problem was a combination of bad timing and over-hype. With the PSP lurking, it just couldn't compare.
"You won't eat our meat, but you'll glue with our feet.." --Some cow
I have an ngage, and I love it. Granted the games are shocking, but its the cheapest Symbian phone on the market, and a very good one at that. Cheapest colour bluetooth nokia too when I bought mine. Might be a failure for games, but its still a hell of a good and cheap symbian phone!
hey hey hey there they have a 2px caption at the bottom that clearly states "simulated screen only" what more do you want from their advertisement? upfront honestly? Yeah next you'll want products engineered with the customer in mind!!!
... and expect to survive. On the bus/train it's too noisy [and honestly you don't always get a seat] and on airplanes they tell you to shut it off cuz it could "send the plane up the bomb!"
Stupid hippies...
Personally I don't see the appeal of it. Not like you can really watch TV while walking around downtown
Well that and watching TV on a 1" screen is just pathetic. At least airplanes have 5" [or so] screens in the back of the head rest thingy...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I think it was a bubble about as big as a cell phone actually ;) Yeah, music/gaming on your phone could be neat and all, and maybe plenty of people think it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. But nokia just 'reported' that it failed: we needed them to actually tell us this? I think the N-Gage is the perfect example of what happens when you try to cram too much into a device that already needs to be a phone, which is no meager task.
Advanced technology be damned I tell you! (sarcasm here, people) but I still get plenty of dropped calls and basic connection failures. I think the size of phones sort of limits them to being good at being a phone and about one other task. With the possible exception of a PDA though, I don't think I've seen any multi-function phone that does a secondary task well enough to make someone stop using their dedicated camera/music player/game device.
Spy der Mann hit it almost squarely on the head with this. People have been stretching themselves too thin in some attempt to add widgets to your cell phone because we all love everything to be portable, and most of us already have cell phones to begin with. The only problem here is that there wasn't any lack of product, but rather the quality of the products have been crippled in many (but not all) cases by limitations of the hardware.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
No game system is ever supposed to have a screen taller than it is wide
Ah those kids today, too old to have enjoyed Tempest, Centipede, Galaga...Pac-Man...
The only way to win is to walk a middle path between having a coherent vision for the product and having an idea of what your customers want.
To pull examples from the movies, "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" and "Gigli" were examples of films created entirely from the top down without any concern for what the viewers wanted while "Catwoman" and "Showgirls" spent so much time giving the audience what they thought they wanted that there wasn't much room for anything but sucking.
The biggest problem is that while a room full of engineers and a table covered with marketing reports is no substitute for one brilliant designer, that doesn't mean that the one brilliant designer can't use a little guidance in what people want.