New Nokia N-Gage Platform Pushed Back

N-Gage as an actual handheld system might have been a complete failure, but that doesn’t mean Nokia isn’t still going to try and attack the market in one way or another. Back in August it was announced that the N-Gage was going to be refit as a mobile gaming platform that would function on certain phones. The pre-release version was set to release last month, and was only going to work on the Nokia N81 (and 8GB) phone(s). That pre-release was delayed into December and has been delayed once again, this time into next year.

The official N-Gage blog said:

We know all of you are eager to get started with N-Gage First Access, and we are just as eager to get it into your hands and start hearing your feedback. We have teams of people around the world, literally, working overtime to deliver this experience to you.

Unfortunately, as can sometimes happen in software development, unexpected difficulties can occur. We have been doing an internal run with more than 1,000 global testers this week, and during this process we uncovered an issue we feel we need to address. Overall, the games and service are working smoothly, but because of this issue, we feel we could not release N-Gage First Access before the holidays as planned.

As we work on a solution, we will continue to polish the overall experience, ready more games for N-Gage First Access, carry on our extensive internal testing over the holidays, and prepare for the new year and the new wave of mobile play.

Personally, I don’t really care about this new version of the N-Gage since I invested in a new phone less than a year ago, and chances are it will never support the N-Gage. And, realistically, I doubt I would ever use it even if I had access thanks to always having my Palm Pilot, so I doubt it’ll impact what phone I purchase next.