History of the N Gage August 1, 2011

Does anyone else remember the Nokia N-Gage? When the cell phone boom began and everyone under the sun started to get their own personal phones for business or personal use, Nokia did very well for themselves, as one of the major cell phone manufacturers. To appeal to younger people, their phones would be fully customizable with replacable phone bodies, programable ringtones, and would even feature a pretty addictive Snake game. They sold like crazy.

Six years ago, Nokia decided to do an experiment and throw their hats into the gaming ring. As one of the biggest personal device manufacterers on the planet, they figured they could compete against the likes of Nintendo in the handheld gaming device market, because their next handheld was going to be more than just a gaming device, it was going to be a personal phone.

Called the N Gage, it was a revoultionary idea which the time’s technology just could not do well or affordably. The price point for the device was far too expensive for a cell phone or a handheld gaming device at the time, and unlike the modern smartphones of today, it was designed for only one of those two options. It did not have a varied library of different productivity software. You could only use it to make calls or play games. The design was pretty bad too, you had to take out the battery to replace game cards (yes, you had physical games for it which came on SD cards) and you had to hold it sideways like a taco to make a phone call with it. The launch price would not be priced to compete, well it would be priced to compete, just not with the Game Boy, it would be priced to compete with the current generation of home consoles.

But what I think killed it most of all was Nokia’s attitude about it. Early on they made a comment to the press that they didn’t expect their customer would be the kind of person who would pull out a Game Boy in public. Well who do you think was Nokia’s potential market? The gamers! This offended a lot of the gaming population, which was this product’s primary market. In fact, the only place you could get it at the initial launch of the device were dedicated game retail stores like GameStop. This did a good job of cutting out potential impulse gamers who needed a new cell phone and could be impressed by the phone’s capabilities. When it launched, revolutionary as it was, reviews were abysmal, and people were not willing to gamble the price point on it, no matter what was promised.

After the initial negative reviews of the original model, Nokia released an updated version of the phone called the N Gage QD. The redesign was a step in the right direction. You no longer needed to hold the phone on it’s side to make a phone call, and you didn’t have to remove the battery to change games. In a lot of ways it was a better device, but more than that, this is the device that Nokia should’ve RELEASED IN THE FIRST PLACE.

There’s a cool article about the phone online that I got a look at this weekend, and it brought back all my memories of the device. I never owned one personally, but a cousin of mine knew a guy who owned an independant Cingular store, when the redesigned N-Gage QD hit shelves and was finally for sale at cell phone retail stores he loaned me one for a week and I barely used it. By this point, I already had a Sony PSP, which while it wasn’t a phone, already had a great library of games and movies which I was enjoying a lot more than a generic golf game on a phone.

Interesting post-script to that story. One of the original media proponents of the N-Gage was former G4 hottie Laura “Thug” Foy, who now does a weekly video series on Xbox Live about the newest software releases for Windows Phone 7.