30 minutes with N-Gage First Access

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Following on from today's launch of N-Gage First Access, Ewan, in 30 minutes with the N-Gage First Access client gives us his first impressions of the system and a summary of the user experience of the N-Gage client. In the piece Ewan covers installation, game installation and the community features of the client application.

So it’s finally here. After a quiet euthanasia of the N-Gage and N-Gage QD software line, the N-Gage brand was put into hibernation till the time was right. And the time is now right. Or at least almost right. Kind of. Promised to be available since late last year, the all new, next-gen N-Gage client is now available for public testing.

This isn’t the final product, as Nokia are making it clear when you download it from the N-Gage Arena forum. This is a public test of the client, and any points scoring you might do in the client are going to be reset to zero when a v1.00 becomes available. And for now, only the N81 users are going to have access to this. I’m sure there will be howls of protest at this, but given this is still a buggy version (I’ve had a few lock ups and mystery error reports in the first hour of testing), Nokia won’t want to have millions of people hammering the server immediately. Restricting it to N81 users will keep the numbers down to a more manageable size, and make bug replication a bit easier, given the only devices theoretically compatible with it are N81’s.

N-Gage First Look (N81) N-Gage First Look (N81)

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