Right, so N-Gage is out and it’s already pushed mobile phone gaming into a brave new world of multiplayer action and eyeball-lickingly lovely graphics – but there’s much more to come. Read on and we’ll tell you what Nokia’s got planned for its new gaming baby…
The key word here is convergence, folks. Yes, it’s an overused term in the tech world but we reckon it’s justified when it comes to Nseries phones, and it’s going to play a big part in N-Gage’s future. How? Well, say you’ve got an N95 with camera, accelerometer and GPS – each of these three features can play a part in games: earlier this year N-Gage big cheese Will Shen gave us the example of a game featuring “a monster you can feed photographs” – yep, the N95 is clever enough to read the histogram from one of your snaps, so the game could tell you to go out and photograph specific things in order to progress to the next level.
And that’s just cameras. GPS receivers can be used for location-based gaming (the jury’s still out on the usefulness of that, but we’ll see), accelerometers mean Nintendo Wii-style motion sensing, which is obviously a great innovation for mobile phones – and don’t forget that an S60 Touch interface is on its way, so expect to be prodding and poking your way around N-Gage games in the not-too-distant future. If this all sounds a bit gimmicky, don’t worry: the Nok is striving to maintain a level head about N-Gage, with Shen promising a “focus on innovation” rather than showiness. We can’t wait…
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