Nokia N93 - first Nokia with HW accelerator

You know, you say they're "very popular", yet I never see people game on a cellphone. I guess your definition of "very popular" is somewhat different than most, or something. I just don't picture myself people spending long sessions with these things. Perhaps they play some Snake or such for a while; I had that on my first cell, was mildly amusing, but if it was so damn popular, I'd notice for sure.

Nokia could sell a billion of these things per year, they'd still not automatically become popular as game devices. Software support isn't there and mindshare isn't there either. Without those two, nokia cellphones could be able to whistle the marseillaise and do cartwheels around the house and it still wouldn't matter.


Worse yet, with the dozens and dozens of other hardware platforms out there means cellphone gaming as a market is incredibly fragmented. You'll probably never see nokia phones with a memory stick slot, and you'll probably never see S-E phones with anything else for example. Even the seemingly simple task of getting your game onto the phone thus becomes a less than trivial matter.


Nintendo's gonna steamroller anything nokia puts out aimed at the gaming market, you know it and I know it.


*G*

 

Nokia has found that hundreds of millions of their users play games on the phones at least occasionally. Like Freecell, Solitaire, or Mindsweeper on a PC, cellphone gaming can reach even the most casual users.

Nokia phones are the single largest platform in existence. Their initiative alone for standardized portable gaming is enough, not to even consider the ongoing standardization efforts, such as Khronos, by many other major companies throughout the carrier, hardware, and software sectors.

Game distribution will be facilitated by simple network purchase and download.

 

You're clearly near-delusional. A bit of freecell and solitaire every once in a while don't a gamer make just as little as me making an omelette in the kitchen once every ten years don't turn me into a cook.


...And what do you need antialiased 3D graphics for in solitaire anyway?


Every Nokia phone throughout the history of time looks different from one another. There's no real commonality anywhere. Just because they all have more or less common hardware guts, a screen and a keypad don't mean they're one single hardware platform. Like I said, ergonomics isn't there.


I'll believe nokia is a credible gaming platform the day I can buy super mario bros for their cellphones...

*G*

 

Grall, I think you are the one being near-delusional when you fail to recognize the size of the mobile game market right now, not to mention the potential it has. A while ago EA bought Jamdat (mobile gaming company) for a sizeable sum.
The number of people who have a cell phone (and might be interested in playing a game now and then) vastly outnumer the people who buy a dedicated handheld.

 

i just want to point out that mobile gaming grew 80% in 2005 and is expected to do at least that in 2006. also, mobile gaming is generaly more popular with females and casual gamers than males or the hardcore segment. pretty much every analyst believes it's the next big thing. even durring microsoft's E3 show they showed xbox live on a windows powered phone, but never mentioned PDAs at all, even though networkable PDAs have been around forever.

personaly, i'm a mobile gamer. if i'm going on a trip or something i'll bring a portable, but if i'm stuck somewhere with nothing to do i'll pull out my phone and play a little snakes or pocket kingdom.

 

80%? Might be, but out of curiosity, where'd you dig that up?

Ok now I work in the mobile games industry, and I personally find it funny that the analysts have predicted this every year since 2002 or so I do agree that the industry has a lot of potential, and it will grow in the years to come but still.. Can't remember if it was at GDC'06 or GDCE'05 where one of the sessions was called "Where's my $10b mobile industry?", I thought it was quite an appropriate topic

 

If mobile manufacturers won't design phones and/or PDAs with better ergonomics and handling for gaming the supposed breakthrough doesn't sound that easy.

Since phones can't get too large and obnoxious, one possible sollution would be a standalone small factor game controller which could be connected to the phone through bluetooth for instance. No idea if it makes any sense at all, but handheld devices like the PSP set a very good example when it comes to ease of handling while gaming.

That of course is a general problem of the entire market and it of course represents only my humble opinion. Having touched numerous PDA/mobiles with recent games after 15 minutes or so my appetite is gone, since it's a pain in the a** to game on those so far.

I guess racing sims would be somewhat fine, yet any kind of FPS .....errrrr no thank you.

 

Yeah, that's one of the problems. One of the most obvious issues is that the manufacturers make bigger and bigger screens, but since the actual handset can't get any bigger (well not much anyway), so the keys get smaller.

SonyEricsson had one of those in the market back in the day. Sort of like your normal game controller with a d-pad and some other buttons, but with a hole in the middle where you attached your phone. It sucked ass.

The problem is that just about the only peripheral you want to attach to your phone are the headphones.

Well I wouldn't say you can't get any kind of an FPS to work on mobile, but doing a straight port from console to mobile just won't work, in pretty much any genre. You gotta work around the limitations.

 

You've obviously never sat waiting, say, for a train or plane or whatever.

 

It exists, and looks like this: http://www.nintendorks.com/chris/archives/miyamoto_iwata.jpg

It was a guess by the analysts. People have expected that consumers would prefer a "convergence device" over multiple dedicated devices when given the choice, but that just didn't happen. Handheld gaming is a huge industry, as predicted, but only a small fraction of it is happening on phones or PDAs.

 

N93 review extract from the mobile review forum

One of the best things about Nokia N93 is undoubtedly its camera module,
which, in fact, makes the name for this handset. It?s not a coincidence
that the manufacturer has used ?Next Story in Video? slogan in the
advertising campaign. Though one could rightfully ask how come such
inexpensive and thus available for the majority of high-tech gadget lovers phone incorporates a camera showing off not only high resolution of still images, but also TV quality video recording capabilities. The answer turns
out to be rather simple: the N93 features several critical solutions,
boosted the phone?s both image taking and video recording capabilities
Firstly, this model has a new chipset by TI embedded in, namely TI2420, so
that it supports a 3D accelerator with rather average specifications. Of
course it appears average only against the background of several models
from NVidia?s very own GoForce series and ATI?s latest developments (stand
alone 3D accelerator). But having a good team of engineers, specializing
in this architecture and already familiar with TI solutions at their
disposal, in conjunction with low energy consumption of the device, make
these chipsets brilliant for mounting on a handset. Time for creating new applications also is not of the minor importance here. In the future this
chipset is more likely to be carried by majority of newly released
smartphones, so Nokia will probably put 3D accelerators above everything
else on their priority list. In its turn, this means big leap for images
quality and video processing capabilities.. This chipset is capable of
powering even 4-5 Mpix cameras and basically one can see that on
используется в Nokia 83, which carries a 5 Mpix matrix.

 

I feel the need to point out the horizontal screen. That's one of N-Gage's flaws addressed, the screen shape and resolution necessarily being part of the next gen platform. What's the ratio? 16:9?

jkemp - are you a Nokia employee by any chance?

 

you know, i can't find the article where i read 80%, but i did find this little diddy over at gamesindustry.biz

 

N93 has QVGA display. So it's 4:3.

Some other new Nokia phones, like the new E-series phones, have 352 x 416 pixel display which is suprisingly good in landscape mode when browsing the net for example (four times the resolution compared to the traditional s60 phones like N-Gage).

I think most upcoming Nokia devices can either use portrait or landscape display mode.

 

If they had stuck to the usual practice of putting the OpenVG meeting on at the same time as Siggraph I'd have had a better chance.

 

If you are wondering what handy games are available, look at this german webpage/company:

http://www.handygames.de/

On the left side you can see the list of the game types and browse the complete list of more than 2000 games. Maybe not the best games, but it clearly shows that handy-games are a real business.
A short while ago I saw an interview on TV where one guy from the company said that in many countries Handygames are more common than PC games cause only a few have a PC but most people have an handy.

Oh I just forgot handy is the german word for mobile phone.


Manfred

 

I know it's the wrong thread, yet I'd urge IMG's marketing department to stay away from linking to BS links like that:

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200605/200605110020.html

Pardon me but I don't give a flying F *cough* if Hollywood Star X or Y uses what as a mobile phone and I don't think IMG's potential customers (like large semiconductor manufacturers) get influenced even by a tiny bit from trash tabloid newsblurbs like that.

 

Just got one in - the Hero is a cool phone with a 3D chip, but is completely closed, and so functionally useless for most folks in the US who want to have a substantial choice of games or apps.

 

The particular news contents themselves are not what Imagination is highlighting with that list of external press links it carries at its site; what they're pointing out is how widely their technology has been adopted into products which are commonplace throughout the media.