Suspicions that Nokia's N-Gage "game deck" was a Trojan horse designed to give the company a foothold in the games industry were confirmed when Nokia yesterday unveiled the N-Gage QD, a major development of the N-Gage, just seven months after the launch of the original.
The N-Gage received a critical hammering at launch, due to perceived design faults: you had to talk into its side, take it apart to change games and were lucky to get four hours' solid gameplay from a battery charge. Websites likened it to a Cornish pasty, and Electronic Arts president John Riccitello described it as a dog. But Nokia reacted quickly, and the N-Gage QD addresses all the criticisms.
The N-Gage QD (Nokia says the name does not mean anything) has a smaller surface area, and is slightly more ovate in shape. It is also thicker, and has a rubber strip around its midriff. A flap in that rubber strip lifts up to reveal a slot that allows you to "hot-swap" game cartridges: put in a cartridge, and the game will launch automatically. You don't need to dismantle the QD to change games.
When using the QD as a phone, you now speak into the top, as with conventional mobile phones, and Nokia claims battery life has been doubled. Pasi Pölönen, director of games publishing at Nokia, says: "You should get up to 10 hours of gameplay. Power saving has been achieved by a bigger battery, techno logical developments and better power management." The QD also gets a new, more closely spaced, numeric keypad, and an extra button below the direction pad performs the Select function previously executed by pushing down on the direction pad.
Nokia also announced that the original model will remain on sale. Pölönen explains: "There are two reasons. First, users are quite happy with it. Once you start using the N-Gage, a lot of the supposedly negative things are not so negative. And there are technical reasons: the N-gage QD is a dual-band, rather than tri-band, phone, and has no MP3 player or radio."
Nokia expects the N-Gage QD to go on sale in the middle of next month, and it should be £10 to £20 cheaper than the N-Gage SIM-free. It will also be supported by a much more impressive line-up of games than the original. Says Pölönen: "I believe a lot of the unfortunate press we received with the N-Gage was due to the content.
"The games we have coming out take much better advantage of the machine's unique mobile communications capabilities. They include The Sims, Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf 2004, and the exclusives - Tom Clancy's Jungle Storm, Ashen, Pathway To Glory, and Pocket Kingdom, a massively multiplayer online mobile game. With Tiger Woods, for example, you can send a text to three friends and play the same course against them, even if you are on the road. We are starting to extract full graphics performance from developers."
