Guess who's back? The N95, if you thought the iPhone was expensive... This is what I think is wrong with the whole idea: You need a 60 series phone, and not any series60 but those that will be compatible, and something tells me only the most powerful-expensive-ones will be selected, plus the series60 never reach the lowend of the market, barely the midend, and when they do its so old that you can get a much better phone for even less money. A dedicated hardware gets cheaper down the road, the problem with the old Ngage was that it was too expensive to begin with, but today they could give something with double the power for free (with a contract). You have to download everything, and cant backup in your PC. In a home console it doesnt look that bad, but a portable isnt something that lasts forever, and cellphones have the shortest lifespan of every portable gadget. Plus theres the fact that carriers will want a piece of the action, so downloads will carry a small premium that will make them as expensive as a cartridge. Remember the ROKR? at least you could download the songs from a PC, but the high prices while on the go helped kill that phone even faster that the bad design it had. Piracy: if Nokia was dumb when they choose to use MMCs instead of a propietary format in the old Ngage (which opened the gates to rampant piracy) they are giving away this new system in a gold plate by relying only in software. I say it will be only a month after release when someone finds out how to crack it. The same way smartphones are a different standart than normal cellphones, consolephones should have their own standart. With the industry growing at this pace is stupid to run games in a hardware that wasnt created for this task, for the same reason most phones cant run the apps of smartphones. Its too much for dumb-casual games like sudoku (the ones nongamers play) and too short for the real thing, you know, the ones you play. So is not only underpowered, but being the most expensive phones from nokia, you can get another cellphone plus a portable console for the same amount. CONTROLS: this is maybe the biggest problem, since playing with cellphones keys is a real pain in the ass. At least the old Ngage had a real Dpad, but the 60series? those are like any other phone out there. Again, smartphones have QWERTY and touchscreen, and even musicphones have dedicated keys (even when they dont need them per se) so a consolephone must have gaming controls no matter what. The only ones that support this new "idea" are EA and gameloft, so you can imagine how is going to end. Funny, suddenly the iPhone looks a whole lot better... Source
Horrible looking design for gaming, imo. I liked the original N-Gage design more. I never got one, but I liked its design more.
Yeah it does look very unfriendly to normal sized hands. If/when this reaches the mid to low end of the market then I can see it actually making an impact..maybe. But at a higher end well I'd much rather lounge around on a couch infront of a TV playing great next-gen games online then cramped over a phone.
You have to download everything, and cant backup in your PC. In a home console it doesnt look that bad, but a portable isnt something that lasts forever, and cellphones have the shortest lifespan of every portable gadget. Plus theres the fact that carriers will want a piece of the action, so downloads will carry a small premium that will make them as expensive as a cartridge. Remember the ROKR? at least you could download the songs from a PC, but the high prices while on the go helped kill that phone even faster that the bad design it had. Eh? This is an issue with practicaly all phones. If you download directly you can't really backup stuff. Only ones you have a backup of are stuff you install via pc to mem stick.
Well thats the reason why musicphones didnt beat the ipod to the ground as some thought it would... Even that, the trend is changing and now new phones like the upstage rely only on memcards that you can backup in your PC.
So series 60 phones don't have PC connectivity? I've got an archaic SE w550I and I can make backups of anything I want via USB..
apart from the things mentioned already, imho the nokia phone design took a turn for the worst by the end of the 20th century. i mean, just look at their foldable cell phones. (is that how you call em in english? if not, i'm sure you can catch my drift) they look FUCKING HORRIBLE, all of them! like the competition looked 5 years ago.
Not if is locked by the carrier, which most of them do. And barc0de, as I said before, the problem is the lack of proper hardware. Almost every smartphone today has qwertyand more power than a normal cellphone, therefore, consolephones should have dedicated controls for gaming and special components like GPUs.
You can make a good phone with decent controls, and the GBA is dead, a lot of people considered it obsolete from day 1, and even then, you've to take in count that cellphones also run an OS-like program at the same time, and that takes its toll on raw power.
ehm, don't make pull numbers and links if you had ever written any code for a cellphone (i have for mine, P800, it has an ARM9 and runs Symbian OS and it's a 4-5 years old cellphone) you d know that phones are potentially more powerful than the DS even. They also pack ALOT more memory. (i have 8Mb user-free memory to boot, newer models have up to 64MB)
Well actualy even the N-gage (S60) has a faster Arm9 then the DS (106Mhz vs 67Mhz). I actualy at one time talked to a coder who built a S60 engine that could output near DS polygon count and the entire thing was software rendering (his demos were fantastic). Yet we all knew the DS was far from cutting edge technology.
The issues of the Ngage were mainly 2: high price and small screen. Now, I know that a screen with a higher resolution (and horizontal layout...) was a problem since it wouldnt work with the nokia standart. But thats just what I was talking about before: you cant make a phone with games, you gotta mas a phone for games, and that was the problem of the Ngage, it was just an overhauled cellphone... The price I think is essential, since all cellphones are subsidized and the Ngage came at twice the price of a GBA. Today it would be fairly easy to make a cellphone that fits between the DS and PSP in terms of raw power and give it away for free with a contract. That would create an instant userbase, which is vital in the console industry.
