Nokia N-Gage

~ the obit ~

nokia owned turkey in 2003. every house had a 3310 or a 6210 in it. every shop sold them. when nokia announced a phone that was also a game boy competitor, you noticed, even if you were not going to buy one. i was nineteen and at university with a regular nokia in my pocket and a counter-strike habit at the internet cafe down the street, which is the demographic the n-gage was supposed to convert.

i did not buy one. nobody i knew bought one. the price in turkey at launch was on the order of 800 lira, which was about three months of student spending money in 2003. the n-gage cost more than a game boy advance plus a regular nokia phone bought separately, and it played a smaller library than either. the local nokia retailer in ankara had the demo unit in the window for months without anybody asking to hold it.

the meme that did the most damage was a real ergonomic flaw. on the original n-gage, the earpiece sat on the side edge of the device. to take a call you held the phone sideways with the screen facing your shoulder, and people called this side-talking. screenshots of office workers holding tacos to their faces went around the english-language tech blogs by the end of october 2003. it was the first viral meme about a phone that turkish forums donanimhaber and frmtr translated and reposted.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

nokia announced the n-gage at e3 2002, more than a year before it shipped. the spec sheet was strong on paper. it ran on symbian series 60, which had a real os and real third-party apps, and it had bluetooth multiplayer for face-to-face matches. nokia had signed third-party publishers including sega and eidos before launch, with a lineup of ports headlined by tomb raider and tony hawk. nintendo's response was to call it a "future joke at parties," which it correctly identified.

launch day was october 7, 2003. the launch price in the us was $299 plus a service contract. retailers cut the price by $100 within seventeen days because units were not moving. the first-week us sales numbers reportedly came in at 5,000 against a game boy advance week of around 500,000.

~ the cracks ~

the cartridge slot was placed under the battery. to swap a game you powered down the device, popped the back cover, removed the battery, then changed the cartridge. one full cycle took roughly forty-five seconds. for a console pitched at handheld gamers used to slotting a cart into a game boy in two seconds, this was a non-starter.

the side-talking flaw was the meme but the cartridge issue was the design problem nokia could not defend. the engineering team had been told to fit a phone, a screen, a cartridge slot and a battery into a form-factor smaller than a game boy advance, and the cartridge slot was the part that lost. the qd redesign in may 2004 moved the slot to the bottom of the device and put the speaker on the front of the case, fixing both issues at once and admitting both had been wrong.

~ the long tail ~

the qd shipped to mostly positive reviews and modest sales. by then the cultural verdict was already in. nokia officially discontinued n-gage hardware on february 24, 2006 and pivoted the name to a software gaming platform on n-series phones, which itself was discontinued in 2010. roughly 3 million n-gage devices shipped in total, against the 6 million projection.

what the device left behind was a meme and a design lesson. the meme is the side-talking taco. the lesson is that a converged device has to be at least as good as either of the things it is replacing, and the n-gage was worse at being a phone than a 6210 was, while being worse at being a handheld than a gba was. nokia would relearn the same lesson with maemo and meego, and microsoft would buy nokia a few years later having ignored the lesson entirely.

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