N-Gage Inside? Now that’s probably going to raise the eyebrows of Intel if they did decide to go for that slogan (not that they are, I’ve just made it up), but that’s essentially what the Nokia N-gage announcement at E3 has boiled down. While all the indications were for a new N-Gage type phone, what Nokia have done is make two big leaps.

The first is that pushing a single handheld gaming machine in the current marketplace just isn’t cutting it. If the N-Gage had reached the 9 million devices they hoped it would, then this shift sideways in strategy would not have been needed. As it is, the concept of high quality gaming has still been proven, with (by our estimates) around 2 million N-Gage and N-Gage QD devices out there. So the question to Nokia would have been where to go next.

They’ve decided to harness the fact that the majority of their smartphones run the same OS and interface (Symbian and Series 60 respectively). So by finally acknowledging what many a hacker knows already, that N-Gage games will by and large run on other phones, the number of phones that can run “N-Gage” games is going to be a much larger piece of market pie than a single device. Great, that’s just what many of us have been saying they should be doing.

There’s probably going to be a set of Gaming API’s for developers so that phones which aren’t ‘optimal’ for gaming won’t be able to run the games. But for the devices where Nokia have decided it would make a good gaming experience, they’ll be present, and I would expect some sort of logo to be used (a logo that would have been nice to have available at E3 for PR mind you). So we can expect a number of phones in 2006 to carry the “N-Gage Inside” (or whatever) program.

In terms of actual gaming handsets, it’s not clear from the information if we’ll get an “N-Gage style” gaming device alongside the more traditional designs of candy bar smartphone. But they would be crazy not to have at least one pure gaming device – even if it’s there just as a flagship to sell everything else.

One of the other interesting points in the press release is the development of a PC based “Games Locker”:

“Consumers can manage their mobile game collection via their PC, with an individual locker of purchased games to make it easy and reliable to track purchases or reinstall deleted games.”

Sounds like the other experiment, having Snake on electronic distribution only (no MMC card copies for the public), along with the popularity of 16MB downloadable demos for titles such as “Pathway to Glory”, has proven to Nokia that they can ship games out this way. Add in Nokia’s Preminet system to charge the end-user for the games, and the building blocks for a huge online gaming system become clear.

Now the cynic is going to point out that strategy is completely opposite to what Nokia said at the launch of the original N-Gage (Game first, Phone Second). The change has been slowly happening though through the life of the N-Gage, as can be seen by the tagline changes for the QD marketing when Gerard Wiener came on board to head up Nokia’s Gaming Section. So what we have here is a graceful side-step from “attack with a single phone” to “attack with a range of future smartphones.” No more using a sniper, time to send in the whole division.

The current N-Gage Devices are going to be supported till the end of 2006 (which was always the intention, to give it a guaranteed three years). With this new focus on gaming over the whole smartphone range, Nokia have found what is, for them, probably the best way forward to stay in the handheld gaming race.