The portable gaming world is littered with brave failures: the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear and Nintendo Virtual Boy all live on in infamy. Sitting with these is the Nokia N-Gage, the Finnish phone giant’s attempt to steal Nintendo’s portable gaming crown.
Unfortunately the original N-Gage device looked like a cross between a Batman accessory and a plastic taco, and when it first appeared in 2003 it cost around twice as much as the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. These factors conspired to make it bomb – the Game Boy Advance outselling the Nokia product 100-to-one in the N-Gage’s first few weeks on sale in the US. But all credit to Nokia – after producing a second, marginally less ugly, but still unsuccessful N-Gage handset, in 2005 the firm decided to turn the N-Gage brand into a ‘platform’, and use its regular Symbian-based phone handsets for the hardware.
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
Comments