Mobile gaming to hold its own in the handheld market?

Nokia have announced that they will buy the mobile software firm Symbian for $410 million. They already own the largest percentage of the company, but will now buy the remaining shares from Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic, and Siemens. Could this be big news for mobile gaming? Read on for a brief discussion and mild speculation.

A Quick History Lesson
Symbian was formed in 1998 when Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and Psion agreed to work together to help bridge the gap between mobile phones and PDAs. Over the coming 10 years companies were bought, sold, merged and dropped out, but Symbian remained as the partnership between several different companies.

One of the main goals of Symbian was, and still is to an extent, to provide a common operating system to span across many mobile devices, across several different manufacturers. Symbian OS was created and allowed for the first time advanced applications to be created and easily put on a large number of different mobile devices. Similar to Java applications, only running on the operating system as oppose to an emulator or virtual machine.

In 2003 Nokia finally launched the N-Gage, a gaming platform based on Nokia’s S60 platform, which uses Symbian OS at it’s core. The service was limited to a few specific N-Gage phones and never took off. The ambitious plan was to try to pull gamers away from the Game Boy Advance, but the clunky design and uninspiring game collection left the device falling far short.

The second attempt to launch the N-Gage began in 2005 when Nokia announced at E3 that they were planning on putting the N-Gage platform inside other, newer, smart phones.

Finally, after several delays, on February 4th 2008, the new N-Gage service was launched. The service now comes installed on a number of new Nokia hand sets and is also available for download to be used on other compatible phones.

Once you have the N-Gage platform, you can buy and download games for around the price of an Xbox Live game. In an interview with Pocket Gamer, Jaakko Kaidesoja, the head of New Experience at Nokia Play, said in reference to the number of games available on the platform that “[i]deally it would be 50 to 60 games released by the end of the year”.

What Does this Have to do With Nokia Buying Symbian?
As N-Gage is based on Symbian OS, the way the two interact is key to the power N-Gage based games have. Huge strides by Symbian recently have meant hardware acceleration on a mobile device is not only possible but now a practical to utilise.

With the hardware in mobile devices ever increasing in speed and efficiency, we could soon start to see games on mobile phones rivalling, at least in presentation, those found on the DS or possibly even the PSP.

Mobile games have long thought to be nothing more than passing, casual games, designed for those few minuets on the bus. Again, this could soon be changing in the mobile world. With games like BioShock getting put on mobile devices, it seems that ground typically ignored by the mobile gaming scene is, all be it slowly, being moved into.

Symbian also has the advantage of numbers. They recently celebrated the 100 millionth phone shipping with Symbian OS on it. To put that in context, the DS and PSP combined have sold just over 100 million units, with the vast majority being the DS.

Combine the rapid pace of mobile phone development with an in-house operating system and already huge install base world wide and we could, very soon, be seeing a 3rd contender in the mobile gaming race.

Tags: Bioshock, Mobile-Gaming, Nokia, Psion, Symbian

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