Tag: N-Gage

N-Gage dies (again)

On 31/10/2009

Nokia’s N-Gage game service has just been declared dead, well dying anyway. always been a concept that has under-delivered painfully. In its first iteration, the device, it was a gutsy but maybe not entirely thought-through attempt to combine phone and dedicated handheld gaming device (it was always going to lose as one simply looked outright silly even when putting the thing towards ones ear to make a call – even when stood at a Star Trek convention, and that is telling). The “new” iteration, the software platform, struggled to take off. Nokia tried mightily to produce showcases demonstrating the superior gaming abilities of the platform compared to “regular” feature and smart phones but the efforts were thwarted from a number of angles:

Too expensive

It was a costly affair to deliver a game optimized for the N-Gage platform. When there is no proven distribution model that can guarantee decent returns, there would always be limited uptake from developers and publishers.

Too small a niche

N-Gage was always geared towards dedicated gamers. All marketing was directed this way, the positioning was distinctly high-end, no non-game applications were shown (or even contemplated, I guess). The power of the platform thus was funneled into a niche of a niche, i.e. high-end gaming. I would suggest that one could as easily have positioned it as a powerful media platform full stop. One that allows for beautiful execution of any number of simple or complex apps (and a game is basically “only” one app category).

There’s an app for that

The iPhone then was arguably the final punch. In spite of developer frustrations growing over discoverability within this pile of 100,000+ apps, the platform has spurned exceptional games galore, and not only casual ones either. Real Racing is as punchy a racing title as one will ever get one on a handheld. And with people flogging to the app store in drones (rather than visiting it once to rarely if ever return), it appeared a less risky (and certainly more fashionable) move to leave it at that. Notably, Apple got the positioning piece (see above) right: even though it is a powerful gaming platform in its own right (anecdotally, the good folks at Firemint managed to string Real Racing to up to an impressive 82 fps), it never looked at this as a sole or even the main focus of the platform. There is a good reason why their already famous moniker says

there’s an app for that

rather than

there is a full 3D, 60+ fps, multi-player, high-end, Bluetooth and WiFi-enabled fighting game with dedicated combo mode for that.

And Mark Ollila, Nokia’s Director of X-Media Solutions and a games and general industry veteran, nails all of this down when he says that

One lesson is the complexities of offering rich games content on a global scale. […] How do you handle the billing, the local marketing intricacies and the type of gaming experiences that work in different markets? And what do consumers actually want – is it the high-end games with connected features that N-Gage was delivering, or a much broader catalogue?

At the heart of it is the conceptually different approach of monolithic, super-rich and highly integrated platform versus a more modular approach: in Apple’s app store ecosystem (or in Android’s for that matter), you can integrate most if not all of N-Gage’s features, too: multi-player gaming, communities, trial versions, etc. But you don’t have to. The former lacked flexibility, which made it susceptible to the nimbler, faster moves of a modular system.

Well then. It at least gives Nokia the opportunity to focus solely on building out the Ovi platform and fix the bugs it has been plagued with at the start. Nokia clearly feels the pains of the rapidly changing market place and it struggles to adapt swiftly (which is – and one should appreciate this – much harder when you are running a product portfolio that has a market share of well double your nearest competitor and stretches all the way from the most basic feature phones to the most advanced smart phones) but it has people that should be capable to turn it around. Not easy, mind you but they’re a mighty player that has shown its ability to innovate numerous times, never forget that.

Nokia Ovi's 20,000+

By Volker

On 09/05/2009

In OEM

Nokia’s interpretation of an app store will be Ovi, and it will launch later this month. This is a biggie since Nokia (according to its own numbers) still commands an imposing market share of – globally – 37%. True to its huge self, it now said it’ll come out with all its guns blazing and kick its app store off with no less than 20,000 “items”! This is being compared to Apple’s “few hundred” upon launch.

However, that contains of course quite a bit of a PR spin: Nokia does not only include applications in its count but also videos and “mobisodes”, and on this definition, one would need to count in the 40,000 or so videos, 3,000 TV shows, etc that the iPhone had on offer via iTunes (numbers via Wikipedia).

So where does Nokia truly stand in May 2009? The company, once famed for cool design (7110 – also known as the “Matrix” phone anyone?) and intuitive UI (yes, really: in the pre-Java age, Nokia’s were second to none when it came to usability and interface) seems to have lost a little of its gloss. Its devices still boast technical excellence (the N96 technically outsmarts every iPhone or Android device easily) but the sex-appeal is considerably lower. Nokia anno 2009 has a little more of a Siemens-like flavour: very well engineered but a bit dull and maybe, well, a little over-engineered. At a time when content finally seems to go mainstream, this is more than only unfortunate: Nokia’s often announced push into the US (where it holds an uncharacteristically small market share) has faltered (again) but the company also seems to lose market share in regions where it previously was unassailable. Moreover, its incremental products, such as the Navteq business, appear to struggle, too (Navteq recorded net sales of only €132m in Q1/2009; compare that to a purchase price of $8.1bn!), as it is arguably being challenged by the – free – Google Maps (which most people I know prefer over the – paid-for – Navteq services).

Nokia’s competition comes less from its traditional foes, Sony Ericsson (struggling itself), Samsung, LG or Motorola but from the newbies like Apple, RIM or HTC, all of which focus on the upper end of the market and leverage this with smart phones that comes – app store or not – with a vastly expanded range of apps and services. Apple has leveraged this in breathtaking ways but one must not forget the gains Blackberry-maker RIM has realized. And while this was not on the back of its app store (Blackberry App World launched only recently), Blackberry devices had always been used for more than only voice and SMS – data services were always at the core of the product.

So where will Ovi sit? Will it revolutionize the mobile phone mass market on the content side, too? Nokia’s attempts so far were something of a mixed bag: Preminet must probably considered a failure, its successor NCD (Nokia Content Discoverer) was always a little bit in the shadows, too. N-Gage is a distinctly high-end service (with – anecdotally – 1m or so subscribers, which is small when you look at Nokia’s overall market footprint), the P2P service Mosh was known (to the people who actually did know of it) for the piracy taking place on the platform rather than for commercial success. In short: Nokia’s moves into content have not been an overwhelming success so far. Ovi has the opportunity to change this. Due to its massive market footprint, Nokia has the opportunity to turn more than 1bn devices into shop windows for content, and this outmuscles anything Apple could even dream of achieving by large margins.

However, the success of an app store is not being defined by the sheer number of content available on or through it but but at least equally by the functionality, the usability and discovery. This is where Apple has been doing so well: the combination and seamless integration of hardware and software and its content strategy out of one mould (with no carrier intervention at all) has lifted the bar for an interface significantly. It might look easy to copy this but it is not. Nokia has also been very (!) late to the game (bear in mind they first announced Ovi in 2007!), and it acknowledges this itself. It will therefore be very interesting to see how Nokia manages to execute it. Be not mistaken: if it succeeds, the content revolution on mobile has truly begun!

Win ME: Bigger, Better, Stronger, Less?

By Volker

On 12/01/2009

In OEM

Last week during the frenzy that was CES, Microsoft put out two statements that I find slightly confusing. Statement no. 1 was the announcement from Steve Ballmer that more than 20 million Windows Mobile devices had been shipped in 2008. He went on to marvel

“about the momentum we have…We have delivered 11 different mobile phones that have each sold a million units each, and in the past year, we’ve brought to market over 30 new Windows Mobile phones, or more than any other mobile platform in the market”

Statement no. 2 was made by Todd Peters (the VP Marketing for Windows Mobile) who said that we s

hould expect fewer devices with Windows Mobile on them. In his words:

“I’d rather have fewer devices and be more focused [as] we get better integration [between phone and operating system].”

Microsoft apparently fears they would be diluting their efforts when they would support the 140 or so WinME devices that are out there today. Hmmm.

Both gentlemen obviously glanced at Apple and the iPhone (can you imagine the sting this must have given Mr Ballmer?). There, hardware and software come out of one hand and there is one device only. The result: great UI, happy users, more use of content, data, etc than ever before. Apple is famously paranoid about controlling all bits of the user experience, and they are masters of it. However, when there is success in the mobile handset space, there is also e.g. Nokia: many, many handset models, now all running Symbian (i.e. another smartphone OS), selling lots and lots of devices all over the world (OK, outside the US). Nokia has fallen behind on the ease of use that used to be a pillar of their rise to fame (and riches) but they serve the lower-end emerging markets as well as the top end of it (something like the N96 etc boast features like few others).

So is the “1 OEM, 1 handset model” philosophy the only winning one? I doubt. Is MSFT maybe mistaken in believing that fewer handsets will mean better overall user experience? I for one do think so. Apple’s success came through a winning formula that combines GUI design, user experience and superb marketing for an overall sexy product. Microsoft has always been lacking Apple’s flair as well as the genial simplicity with which Apple manages to provide solutions that are often a lot less elegant and more complicated than Microsoft’s. But, guys, you don’t solve this by getting your OS out less. You have got to put some work into the OS and its APIs, and – as some commentators to Mr Peters’ comment that they would “extract more from this license” noted – it helps to look at a product from a consumer perspective rather than from the corporate boardroom’s product P&L, at least when you speak in public!

Update: There has been a bit of a media tussle over this. I posted an update over here.

Finally: a new Palm

By Volker

On 09/01/2009

In OEM

After bloody ages (and 425m Elevation dollars later) Palm came out with a bang yesterday at CES by unveiling the Pre and its new WebOS. Palm’s shareholders will be chuffed as the stock surged in the hours afterwards. Now, what is it? And does it have legs? One of the first reports (even containing a minute-by-minute live-blog of the presentation) notes that

‘its form factor is a blend of the HTC Touch and the iPhone. The software looks an awful, awful lot like that of the iPhone — multitouch, gestures and so on. Many of the apps also have a very strong likeness to the iPhone […].”

That in itself is of course not a bad thing. And other reports confirm high hardware quality and nice UI. However… Aren’t they a bit late? And where will the content come from? Palm used to have a faithful following on his Tungsten and Treo product lines but this is a while ago now and there have been some awesome devices in the interim, some of which – most notably the iPhone and the G1 as well as RIM‘s Blackberries and the higher-end Nokia devices – have amalgamated a great device with a great UI and commercial environment into a huge following. Apple AppStore, Android Market, N-Gage and Ovi, Blackberry Application Center, etc, are all there or there about. And Palm will be up against that. The fact that it has – at least initially – tied itself to Sprint only will not be much help there.

WebOS is said to be easy to develop for. Allegedly HTML, CSS and some other stuff known from the web would be enough to develop for it. But will anyone do it unless there is a device base large enough to make it a compelling commercial case (which even seems to hit platforms like Nokia’s N-Gage; THQ has just apparently dropped its “Worms World Party” development for this).

It’s nice to see they’re back but I think that the jury is still out on the success of this.

Zeemote, the 3rd…

By Volker

On 27/08/2008

My dear friends at Zeemote, I’ve been giving you a hard time on this blog in the past (first here, then here). Now, in my second post on the device (which is, for the ignorant few, a bluetooth connected controller for mobile phones) I issued two concerns, namely

distribution (which I suggested would only work with bundling) and
usage (the keys, wallet, phone dilemma).

You will have seen that my mood is somewhat mellowing, and this is indeed connected to the fun one can have with this little thing.

So it came as no surprise that on the first point, the good folks at Zeemote have been impressively busy in the recent months. They managed to strike a number of rather noteworthy deals, the perhaps most impressive one (to date) being with Nokia. At the Games Convention, they announced that they would bundle (see? I told you!) the Zeemote controller with some N-Gage-enabled devices. Here’s the clou though: it will be tied in through a dedicated little application in a way that allows users to control every game available on N-Gage via their Zeemote, even if the games and applications themselves do not have the precious lines of code in them. And that it is pretty cool indeed as it circumnavigates the dilemma of having a device that no software supports and which is therefore not being used. I played it, it works. Awesome!

A couple of weeks before, Sony Ericsson launched a bundle in a test market (see here), so they seem to be gaining traction indeed. I hear there’s more to come soon but I’ll wait till the news is out…

Now, as to the other question, namely if people would take it with them? Well, we’ll have to wait as only time (and hopefully many users) will tell. What is undeniable though is that the Zeemote lowers the threshold to play as it greatly facilitates access and controls when playing a game on mobile. If users get the device together with their new phone, I am rather sure that they’ll give it a try. The device will be best shown off (initially) with games and apps that are hard to control and where users are more likely to be put off playing them with the fiddly controls of a phone. If this is being put to work (which I trust the Zeemote folks are smart enough to embark on), there is a good chance, they’ll convince people enough to make them use it more and more. And once they’re hooked? The sky is the limit.

And then, there are also uses for it at home: you don’t have a Wii but 2 Zeemotes, a TV and a phone? Go on and play! Works! True! Check here.

Nokia opens doors (if you read Finnish, that is)

By Volker

On 30/08/2007

Nokia launched its new Ovi platform to great fanfare. Ovi is apparently Finnish for “doors“, which gives a hint on what they intend to do: lots of door-opening to “delivering experiences and services”, which now is their business according to CEO Kallasvuo.

There is not too much on tangible details so far. Ovi is supposed to be the door (geddit?) to a bundle of services, namely their new music service, their revived N-Gage gaming brand (now a service and not a device anymore; good New York Times article here) and Nokia Maps. Then, it is said, it shall also “the entry point for other Web and mobile services”. Which ones? Dunno…

Nokia is of course perfectly positioned to try and unify a content experience on the fragmented mobile space: its massive market share in most markets around the world allow it to push its platform onto a lot of existing devices. As an attempt of unifying the scattered environment, this is probably as good as it will get in the shorter term, so fingers crossed!