The folks over at the N-Gage Arena mentioned about a month ago that they were working on a site to answer all questions about Nokia's upcoming Next Gen gaming platform. The Arena staff have now put up a link to the Future Watch site, however at the time of writing it's password protected and inaccessible to the public. In the meantime if you're interested in gaming on S60 3rd Edition smartphones you can still fill in the Future Of N-Gage Survey to give Nokia your opinion of what you think should be included in the Next Gen platform. Credit goes to to Arena member sbrasio for alerting people to the new Future Watch forum section.
Our very own krisse reviews Reversi FE for S60 3rd Edition (but also available for most other Symbian OS platforms). Back to your homes, not much to see? After all, it's only Reversi, right?
Nokia's Jaakko Kaidesoja gave a very interesting interview to Pocket Gamer at the Nokia World event. Apparently, there will be between five and seven S60 3rd Edition smartphones which will support Nokia's Next Gen gaming platform when it launches next year, presumably with that number expanding after the launch as even newer models appear. Here's the interesting bit though: "Some of (the smartphones) are already being sold today ... if you have one of those devices, you'll just have to go to our website, download the application to your phone." Frustratingly however, he declines to say which models these are. (Thanks to Symbian Freak for pointing this story out!)
Nokia has commissioned a survey by Nielsen Entertainment which interviewed 1800 users of mobile phone games from China, Germany, India, Spain, Thailand and the United States. The results are available in a press release and suggest that people will enjoy using Nokia's Next Generation gaming platform which is due for launch in the first half of 2007. Perhaps the most interesting is the average gaming session length: 28 minutes, which is far longer than is usually thought the case on phone games, and implies that the average phone gamer plays with as much dedication as they would on a portable console.
Similar to Uno, the card game that's currently popular again thanks to the Xbox 360, Mau Mau is a well-executed card game for all S60, UIQ and S80 smartphones. Krisse plays through a tournament on the E61 and gives the AllAboutSymbian verdict...
Nokia is going to be one of the main sponsors of GDC Mobile, the phone game part of the Game Developers Conference. GDC and GDC Mobile take place in San Francisco from the 5th to the 7th of March 2007. Nokia's Next Generation gaming platform is due to launch across a range of S60 3rd Edition smartphones some time in the first half of 2007, so a March sponsorship of a major gaming event would seem to be well-timed.
Our resident game emulator expert krisse reviews MasterGear, bringing the old SEGA Master System and Game Gear and their titles to S60 3rd Edition. Summary: it works well and will bring the memories flooding back. Also, don't forget to check out our updated guide to S60 3rd Edition game emulators.
Google Co-Op, a recently announced service, allows you to create custom search engines. Here is a custom search engine for Symbian related sites, which can also be accessed via SymbianSearch.com. The search includes many of the largest Symbian sites, but if you think you know of another site that should be included you can edit the list of included websites.
An apparently genuine Nokia document contains some interesting details about their Next Gen gaming platform, which is due to launch across a range of Nokia smartphones in the first half of 2007. In the document is a list of publishers which it claims are working on content for the platform, and which surprisingly includes Sony. The document also gives some details about the distribution channels and development kits. (To find out more, click here...)
