Nokia enters portable gaming market
By Josh Zelman
CNN Headline News
 |
Nokia's N-Gage
Story Tools
|
(CNN) -- Nokia is unleashing a cell phone, digital music player, personal digital assistant and handheld video game system packaged together in one portable device.
It's called the N-Gage and it's Nokia's attempt to diminish Nintendo's domination of the portable gaming market. The $300 combination unit hits shelves this week.
Dan "Shoe" Hsu, editor in chief of Electronic Gaming Monthly, tells me the combination concept sounds good on paper, but in practice it "fails to deliver." Adding, "it is not even close to the GameBoy Advance."
For starters, Shoe tells me the N-Gage's controls are "laid out kind of funny," noting that gamers use the same keypad to call friends and to dodge bullets during games.
Secondly, he says switching games takes too much effort. Shoe says that instead of simply sliding cartridges in and out like on the GameBoy Advance, gamers have to remove both the N-Gage's cover and battery to load a new title.
Finally, Shoe says, "Most of the games are not good." He compares them to the downloadable cell phone games -- the only difference being this costs about five times as much.
Shoe says he isn't alone in his critical comments. He says the N-Gage didn't make a splash at "E3," this year's big video game conference, and he's yet to meet a single person outside of Nokia who likes the product.
Nokia doesn't seem worried. A spokesperson for the company told Reuters that it predicts "several million" units will be sold in 2004.
