The N-Gage, a taco-shaped 
phone/gaming system that failed horribly shortly after it’s original launch in October 2003, has apparently resurfaced after all these years as a software application. While you can still see the pile of N-Gage games on the shelves of Gamestops all over the country, the concept behind the gaming phone might just be more plausible in this format. As phones evolved after the initial launch of the device, people soon found out that the N-Gage games could actually be played on other devices, making the phone itself obsolete.
This new attempt to take over the mobile gaming market, which has surprisingly been under developed in the way of online multiplayer games since the N-Gage’s last incarnation, will allow all future Nokia users the ability to enjoy mobile gaming on a new level. If you currently own a N81 you should be able to download the demo software already and I believe they have actually hacked it to make it compatible will all Nokia model’s boasting the proper hardware. What this means is we may actually see mobile gaming taken seriously. It’s been attempted before and with portable gaming systems losing their wired connections, it shouldn’t be to difficult to make this into a reality instead of the failed mess it currently is.
When things like this come around, it almost makes me regret my iPhone.
Mobile phones have all the attributes of a games machine: a screen, memory, processing power and an input device. They also have the advantage of connectivity. So it is of little surprise, given the sheer numbers, that the most distributed and the most played game in the world today is Snake on Nokia handsets. Yet this is a false beacon because mobile phone gaming is a very tiny fraction of the size that it should and could be.