Dom

With the N-Gage set to arrive at retail on October 7th Rob Fahey takes an in-depth look at the final hardware and some of the launch software for one of the most interesting but most maligned consoles of all time.

• The road to being a platform holder in the games industry is never an easy one. Altogether too many times in the past, consumer electronics companies have entered this industry with plans of dominance, and then run off with their tail between their legs - Matsushita's M2 never saw the light of day, Philips' CD-I decks were an expensive failure, and the less said about the Nuon the better. For every Sony PlayStation, there are five noble (or indeed ignoble) failures gathering dust under the TV of history.
  
  Microsoft could tell you how difficult it is to be taken seriously any more as a competitor in the games industry. The Xbox was a whipping boy for the games media, and indeed for many gamers, right up until the launch of the console and beyond - with Microsoft being accused, not entirely without reason, of simply relying on its bags of cash to ensure success.
  
  Right now, Nokia is probably feeling roughly the same pains that Microsoft felt prior to the launch of Xbox - and possibly taking heart from the success of Xbox in the intervening years. With a global console launch scheduled for October 7th, Nokia's N-Gage still has a battle for hearts, minds and wallets ahead of it, and the company has made many of the classic mistakes we all watched Microsoft make in the early days of the Xbox project. In Microsoft's case, one disastrously bad E3 showing was enough to convince the company to rethink much of its approach and put the console back on track. Disastrous is a word many people would have applied to Nokia's E3 conference back in May - but whether the company has changed anything in response remains to be seen.

-Review