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!)