All About Symbian - Symbian, Nokia and S60 unwrapped.
N-Gage Future Watch site launches
Published by krisse at 22:35 UTC, December 20th 2006
Nokia's Future Watch site devoted to their Next Gen gaming platform on S60 3rd Edition smartphones has now officially launched. The site tries to answer the most frequently asked questions about the new platform, something N-Gage Arena members have been waiting for ever since the Next Gen was announced. While Future Watch mostly repeats the information that Nokia's given out at various press conferences over the last year, this is the first time all the official statements have been collected in one place, and in amongst the familiar facts there are one or two gems of significant new information as well. Click here to find out more...New information on Future Watch:
- The Next Gen platform launches in mid-2007 rather than the first half of 2007.
- Most of the Next Gen games will not require a 3D acceleration chip to be present in the smartphone they're running on, although a minority will.
- Six launch games have already been announced (the first party Nokia ones), and there will be more launch games announced between now and the Summer (presumably the third party ones from the likes of EA, Gameloft and others).
The rest of the site is basically a rehash of their announcements and videos from their E3 2006 site published last May, but if you missed that or Future Watch it's well worth checking them both out as they provide a lot of detail as to how the platform will work. You might also want to check out AAS's own feature about the Next Gen from last October (which we will update as soon as Nokia starts giving out major new information on the topic).
In short, the Next Gen platform will feature very strong community features on board the actual phone, something like a portable equivalent of Xbox Live, and the games themselves will all be available to buy as direct downloads straight onto your phone (through 3G or wi-fi) or as downloads onto your PC bought from a website which you then transfer to your phone (in a similar style to the iPod and music bought on iTunes).
The lineup of compatible smartphones for the launch of the platform hasn't been announced yet (and possibly hasn't been finally decided either), but Nokia had already stated in an earlier interview that there will be about half a dozen compatible smartphones at the launch (and that some of them are already on sale), with new devices added to the platform as new S60 3rd Edition models launch. There's no word either of whether a gaming-oriented console-shaped model will be released, and while it would seem logical to do something like that it may be that Nokia fears it would induce direct comparisons in the media with the commercially unsuccessful N-Gage and N-Gage QD smartphone models.
Perhaps the most significant revelation on the site is that most of the games won't require a 3D chip. This doesn't mean that these games won't be in 3D, three dimensional games are perfectly possible without a dedicated chip as anyone with a PlayStation will tell you. However, it does mean that the platform won't be all about graphics, there's more to it than just graphics (a smart move perhaps, considering the triumph of the underpowered Nintendo DS handheld over the graphics-intensive Sony PSP).
It also means the Next Gen will probably reach a far wider audience than just the owners of expensive 3D-equipped models such as the N93 and N95. It should have a userbase of many millions (perhaps tens of millions) at launch, and the userbase will grow all the time as new S60 3rd Edition models are released. The original N-Gage and N-Gage QD's greatest curse in the end was the lack of third party support, and by all accounts the reason for this was the small number of people who bought an N-Gage or QD, just 2 million over two years. If the Next Gen platform manages to have several times that number of users on its launch day, with millions more added each month, that will make it far far more attractive to third party games publishers.
(Thanks go to Arena member Funkyflea for pointing out that the site had gone active!)
News Discussion
Over and above that, I used to wonder why, even after coming out with a plethora of Symbian 9 phones, is nokia still keeping N70 alive by coming out with Music Edition and Internet Edition. Now it seems they may come out with a Gaming Edition of N70 too.
Moreover, If you browse around the shady regions of the internet, you'll find N70 has always been capable enough, it would be great if nokia officially recognises its potential.
More to the point, I do hope there will be a decent selection of 3D accelerated games as well, so as to have that option and to maintain and increas Nokia's lead in mobile gaming.
It won't be limited to 3D chips, the site actually says so.
But I can't see any evidence that they'd go back to Symbian 8.
Nokia recently said there would be about six phones that would support the platform at launch, most of which haven't been released yet (so they're bound to be Symbian 9 because they're new). They also said that even more new models released after the launch next year would also be added to the platform (and they're also bound to be Symbian 9 because they're new).
It's just not worth writing completely separate Symbian 8 versions of the games if there's hardly any Symbian 8 models that support the platform. Symbian 9 is not backwards compatible with Symbian 8, it would take extra work to make two versions of everything. It would also put off third party publishers if they were told that they had to write everything for two separate platforms, and third party support is something that every games platform needs a lot of.
Nokia are still manufacturing and marketing the N70 for the same reason they're supporting their non-Symbian phones, because it's a very popular model which is earning them lots of money. They were still manufacturing the 3310 until last year! :-) Most people who buy the N70 aren't doing it for the software, most of them probably don't even know what Symbian or S60 are.
The "internet edition" and "music edition" aren't really different to the original versions, they're the same phones doing the same things that the "normal edition" does. It's a marketing trick more than anything else, so that the average person realises that they can use their phone as an ipod or a web browser. Many people don't realise just how powerful phones are nowadays.
By the time the games platform launches in the middle of 2007, the N70 will be two years old, ancient in smartphone terms. Another problem is that the N70 also has a tiny screen resolution, the same as the original N-Gage, whereas most of the new S60 models have resolutions of 320 x 240 or even higher. It would be a pain to support a low resolution when the vast majority of compatible phones have a much higher resolution.
I hope I'm wrong, it would be great to see the games available to virtually anyone with a S60 phone, but it seems very unlikely.
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