What does N-Gage mean to you? Sidetalking? Fiddly game card insertions? Pathway to Glory being pretty good? Nokia wisely binned the hardware model last year and announced that N-Gage was now a global software "eco-system". In English? Basically a piece of software that will pull in publishers, developers and users and run on any Series 60 mobile.
As someone who only plays mobile games as a last resort - and even then I usually give up in minutes - I was interested to see if N-gage could offer something that would finally make mobile gaming live up to its incessant hype. And the demo I saw yesterday may well do that. If you're feeling lazy then think Xbox Live on your mobile. Ok, clearly it isn't a patch on Live but online gaming, friend lists and try and buy are a cut above what you would normally associate with mobile gaming. What I saw showed an intuitive looking interface, with easy access to your games, friends etc. As you'd expect community is vital, with the ability to create events, post reviews and generally do that web 2.0 thing.
So far EA, Gameloft and Glu have signed up with more announcements soon. N-Gage is apparently of interest to developers who, "welcome the chance to work on a unified mobile plafform". Even taking Nokia's spin into account you can imagine this being fairly true - developing for different handsets is a recurring nightmare for mobile games devs.
Of course, there are still important details to be ironed out before the Autumn launch - data costs, coverage, variety of titles - but there was enough shown to suggest that N-Gage could be the catalyst that finally makes mobile gaming interesting.
