N-Gage voted "fading star" by mobile execs
Panel of 147 mobile executives cast a vote of no confidence in Nokia's reborn service
Nokia's N-Gage has been labelled a "fading star" by a panel of 147 senior mobile games executives, who said that a number of mobile platforms would have to move fast to avoid obsolescence against Apple's iPhone and Google's Android.
Approximately 48 per cent of the panel, brought together by the Multimedia Research Consultancy, voted the N-Gage negatively, with a further 22 per cent voting that Java is "unlikely to be around in five years time", while only 15 per cent thought that the Palm was "here to stay".
"Some of the scores attained by individual developer platforms and operating systems were nothing short of dismal and will raise alarm bells amongst their management teams," commented Vic Whiting, MD of the Multimedia Research Consultancy.
"We acknowledge that these results represent industry sentiment at a particular point in time and we do not expect rival developer platforms and operating systems to simply lie down and die," he said.
"However, they will all have to raise their games quickly and forcefully if they are to counter the momentum and impact being achieved by the likes of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android."
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Thing is... N-Gage has two critical issues. Firstly it represents a lowest-common-denominator snapshot of specification from a few years ago. That means no 3D hardware acceleration at all for you bub. Doesn't matter what the spec is if all the latest Nokia phones. Secondly, N-Gage itself has *only just* actually turned up pre-installed on Nokia phones.
The billing mechanism is to be via phone bill sort of thing, which sounds convenient from an end-user perspective but having tried it, it just didn't actually work. In fact the process of getting N-Gage on my phone and buying a game was not what you might call a mass-market friendly experience.
Nokia did talk about developing an SDK for authoring native games on their phones which might be more interesting in conjunction with their Ovi store. I think that's what they should be talking about these days.
Curious about 22% of execs thinking Java is going away. Reckon they're aware Android is a Java platform?
Posted:7 years ago