We’ve been using Nokia’s N-Gage as a punchline to (extremely nerdy) jokes for years now, ever since we first heard about Sidetalking—long before the N-Gage actually hit the market and, you know, failed. Ewan Spence over at All About Symbian’s written a fairly long piece about how we should stop mocking the N-Gage and pay attention to how Nokia’s been using what they’ve learned about mobile gaming with the N-Gage platform to sneak improved mobile gaming experiences onto their incredibly popular S60 phones:
Putting [Nokia] up against the heavyweights gives a raw number of roughly 4 million N-Gages shipped, against 17 million PSP’s and a comparable number of Nintendo DS. But now ask yourself another question. How many S60 phones are going to ship in the next 12 months? Maybe 50 million? How many of them are going to be able to play these next generation of mobile games? Maybe 30 or 40 million? Those numbers are standing up pretty well against Sony and Nintendo now, aren’t they?
We hate to admit it, but Spence does make some sense. But we’re not going to give the Sidetalk jokes up, you’ll have to pry our love for them out of our dessicated little walnut hearts after we’re all long dead and buried.