On a large riverboat alongside the London Eye, the world's biggest maker of mobile phones is already unveiling its big Christmas push. It might only be February, but last week, Nokia invited 200 journalists to the banks of the Thames to launch its foray into the hyper-competitive games console market.
It is called N-Gage: a fan-shaped, handheld games "deck" that will cost less than £350. Several million will spill out of Nokia's factories in China and Hungary to be in shops in autumn. The device will feature the return of old favourites such as Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog and Lara Croft, as it attempts to break into a market dominated by Japan and the US. No other European company has attempted the release of its own games console.
The pencil-thin device, roughly the size of a postcard, has a 10-digit keypad and a small colour screen. It runs the Symbian operating system you find on the latest colour phones. The N-Gage also sends text messages and hooks in to the net. Flip it on its side and you can make a voice call. N-Gage is really little more than a mobile phone.
"We have already sold over 250 million handsets together with the game Snake," says Ilkka Raiskinen, of Nokia. "Our research has shown that nearly everyone has played the game at some time in that product's life. Based on this, we started to develop a games device."
Nokia says it is launching into a growing market. Games sold in record numbers in the UK last year, while a recent survey by Deutsche Bank reported that there are 100m handheld gamers in the world. "This is a new market segment," explains Nokia's Kari Tuutti. "We are not looking to start a bloody fight." But N-Gage's most obvious rival is Nintendo's Game Boy, with 97% of the handheld market. It costs only £70.
Nokia says that people will be willing to pay what could be five times as much, because the N-Gage offers gamers the opportunity to play games as part of a group. Using Bluetooth (short wave radio) networks, up to four people can compete in a single game, within a radius of a few metres. Later, when faster wireless networks become available, Nokia says that players will be able to compete over vast distances. No other handheld machine allows for this wireless multiplayer experience.
I was given a short glimpse of the N-Gage during a trip on the London Eye. The device is surprisingly light and thin. You hold it as you would a hand of cards, your thumbs doing the work. The screen, though small, is clear, and worked fine for three-dimensional games such as Tomb Raider but was much better in 2D. The multiplayer function worked with Bluetooth and presented no problems as long as I was facing my opponent.
Nokia won't reveal exact figures but indicated that N-Gage games, to be sold in tiny MultiMedia Cards, would be priced similarly to other console games. They will be many times more expensive than the £3 charged for the games currently sold on the latest range of Java-enabled colour phones, for example. But because the N-Gage is also a phone, games publishers and developers should be able to make extra money by charging for extra bits of the games, such as new levels or cheats - as they do on Java phones.
If Nokia sells millions, its radical design will mark just how far the mobile phone has evolved. Although phones are much smaller than they were, their basic shape and function has changed little since the early prototypes emerged from the labs of Gowgen Manufacturing Corporation of Chicago (later Motorola) during the second world war. N-Gage bears little resemblance to those prototypes or the phone you have in your pocket today. It is a mobile phone whose voice call function is, essentially, an afterthought.
