With all the PlayStation Portable,
Nintendo DS, and
Game Boy Advance news breaking daily, it's quite easy to
forget about the other, less ubquitous handheld gaming devices out there, such as Nokia's gaming/phoning hybrid, the
N-Gage. And even though there hasn't been much news about it lately, that hasn't stopped the N-Gage from playing host
to several
very
worthy
games in the last few months. Could Nokia's
little portable not be as catastrophic of a failure as we all thought it would be? Well, they may have only sold 1.5
million of the things to date, but Nokia doesn't show signs of abandoning their underrated handheld any time soon. In
an interview with Reuters, Nick Simonson, Nokia's Chief Financial Officer, is quoted as saying:
"We are a product company. That's a virtue, not an evil. How we're going to play the gaming business across the whole portfolio is what you need to keep an eye on, and part of that is including with the N-Gage game decks, obviously… Our approach to this is, let's continue to take what we've learned, what we've done right, and where we need to make corrections, and that's in retail, in games development and in the deck itself… Mobile gaming is here to stay, the question is how the value chain is created and who can take advantage of it."
Rather than the demise of the N-Gage, could this mean that Nokia is planning another incremental improvement over the QD? I guess we'll have to wait until E3 to find out…
