How do you let people know that their mobile phone plays games? Well if you are Nokia and the country is Indonesia, you hire a promotional bus (reports the Mobile Games Blog). As the bus tours the country, staff on board will demonstrate to people how to get the N-Gage client on their phone and download the demos themselves. And of course show them how to purchase the games using pre-pay vouchers.

Similar to the voucher that came in the box with certain N-series phones (such as the N85), these vouchers can be used to activate any N-Gage game by entering the voucher code when prompted to active or buy a game. The promotional nature of vouchers has already been used – and it's also how journalists such as ourselves receive review copies of certain titles.

By making the vouchers available to buy and used against any game title, this makes it far easier for people to buy games in countries and areas where there are no arrangements to bill via the network, or where credit cards are not common.

It also brings Nokia into line with stores like the Xbox Live Arcade and the iTunes Music Store, both of which have vouchers you can buy from hundreds of thousands of locations.

-- Ewan Spence, January 2009.