In another thread I showed a concept. With the rise of Android based consoles, do you think Nokia could relaunch the NGAGE? Recently, Nokia has been showing interest in gaming with the opening of a new gaming centered division of Nokia, and the launch of Nokia Modern Mayor on Windows Phone 8. Well, imagine a new NGAGE, called the NGAGE 2.0, while featuring all functions of a phone, it still has a focus on Games and has an external joypad on the system. Of course, the UI shown would launch optionally. If wanted, the user could set the device to boot to the stock UI. It could be cool too if possible, to feature a built in emulator to play original NGAGE games. That could boost sales too for retro gaming geeks. Would anyone buy it? (FYI, I used the AT Games Sega handheld for the concept because of the color scheme reminded me strongly of the NGAGE.)
I think http://www.sonymobile.com/gb/products/phones/xperia-play/ confirmed that the majority of people aren't really interested in a dpad on a phone. Maybe third time lucky.
Me, I'm not interested in having a phone in my gaming device... I like to keep that separate. Both my N-Gage and NG QD have invalid SIMs in them, and my phone doesn't have any games on it (...any more, at least. It used to have but the novelty wore off fast.). Anyways, looking at CR's idea from the software side: What would it run on? If it's Android, then what makes it better than other Android gaming/phone devices that already exist? Is it Windows? Can't see many takers for that, but that's just me... Or if it's sth completely different (yet another Symbian?), is there enough incentive to get a critical mass of developers invested in it? Keeping devs from cross-publishing on Android/IOS would be a huge plus, too, since you want to somehow draw and bind customers to your platform. IMHO, providing an "integrated" mobile experience (meaning providing everything from hardware to a (walled-garden) software ecosystem) has become a really hard thing to do these days, pretty much everyone and their uncle Bob can pump out cheap and rather powerful portable devices. You really need something to stand out, and a dpad alone probably ain't cutting it.
