N-Gage Inside: Nokia starts shipping first phones with N-Gage built-in
Published by Tzer2 at 19:12 UTC, June 17th 2008
By a curious coincidence, just hours after AAN posted an editorial discussing N-Gage being embedded into phones, Nokia has announced on its official N-Gage blog that it has begun shipping the very first phones with N-Gage pre-installed. This means people will be able to access the new platform on their new phone straight out of the box, which will hugely expand the platform's userbase.
The first phone to have N-Gage built-in will be the N81 (and presumably its technically-identical cousin the N81 8GB too). Other models including the N95, N95 8GB and N82 should also start shipping with N-Gage built-in over the next few months.
This is great news for N-Gage, as it will probably bring lots of new people to the platform including those who don't know about N-Gage, those who don't know how to install applications manually, and those who aren't keen on N-Gage but might be tempted to try it if it's pre-installed.
This is the beginning of the proper launch of N-Gage, Nokia is finally using its trump card of including their gaming platform with popular phone models. Embedded N-Gage can be used straight out of the box, you just click on the icon and select some games from the showroom to try or buy.
However, the most important part of the launch is yet to come: the real moment of truth for N-Gage will be when it is embedded in brand new phone models right from their very first day.
Categories: Hardware, Industry, Editorial Thoughts
Platforms: N-Gage
News Discussion
That means that N-Gage would start reaching people who regularly update their compatible phone's firmware, and also people who take their phone to a repair shop (firmware updates are usually done on all phones that are repaired). That too will expand N-Gage's userbase.
Could someone with an N81 try updating their firmware to see if it includes the N-Gage app? The new firmware may not be released to the public yet so don't update your firmware if there's no new version available, but if there is a brand new version can you let us know what happens when you install it?
Try to back up your phone's memory on your PC before doing the firmware update, because that's currently the only way to preserve your N-Gage saved games. The memory card backup option does NOT preserve saved games for some reason.
i hope it's worth the cost and the wait
Happy gaming
That's three headline items you've let us know about! :-)
The demo's a bit weird though, if you try to alter any settings at the beginning it immediately takes you to the "purchase now" screen, you have to press exit to get back to the demo.
I must admit i'm impressed so far i don't usually like these kinda games plus we get a decent demo of the game not a stupid 30 seconds like Blockbreaker lol.
I must admit i think it's worth the 8GBP and i'm getting it once demo runs out
Any idea when demo End's ?
On the 10,000 points bug, I don't think most people will get anywhere near that very quickly, you'd have to buy ten games and get all of the pickups. By the time most people do get 10,000 points there will probably be a fixed version of the app, if they haven't fixed it already on these phones.
There's also a chance of course that this embedded version has the bug fixed, in which case we can probably expect a new version of the N-Gage app as a download soon.