Nokia announced it would not build N-Gage smartphone number three in May, most likely due to the lukewarm reception on the part of the public for the gaming-centric handset. More recently, the Finnish phone giant's N-Gage division head Anssi Vanjoki told Reuters it would have like to have sold two-thirds more N-Gages than it did.

"I am not happy. I said we needed to sell six million in three years, and we sold one-third of that. We need to make some changes," Vanjoki said.

Instead of giving up on N-Gage all together, the company said this Spring it would port the underlying technology of the platform to other devices built on the Symbian operating system (OS) and its own Series 60, now S60, interface. That would greatly increase the number of potential users for the technology and - (perhaps) more importantly - developers and carriers who create and distribute the content for N-Gage.

Vanjoki says the first Nokia smartphones to support N-Gage games other than the eponymous devices themselves are the company's new multimedia-centric and consumer-friendly NSeries. The mobile phone vendor introduced the first three Nseries models in the Spring - the N90, N91 & N70 - with an additional trio - N92, N80 and N71 (see image below) - just coming to light last week.

The N70 and N90 (SmartPhoneToday has a review of this model in the works) is shipping in some markets, with the N91 due for release earlier next year. All three of last week's models won't ship until next year.

Mobile Game Market
Last year, Juipter Research, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation (the parent company of this website), predicted that the addressable audience of portable gamers will nearly double from 23 million to 43 million by 2009. That's a lot of thumbs connected to a lot hands that could be forking over a lot of money to game developers, publishers and providers.

Joining traditional gamers on devices like Nintendo's GameBoy Advance will be players in a new, Jupiter-defined "hybrid" category, which included TapWave's now defunct Zodiac and Nokia N-Gage platform, as well as those who play games heavily on smartphones, traditional PDAs or cell phones. You could also add Nintendo's own increasingly PDA-like DS device and Sony PSP to this category as well.

Three major smartphone OSs - Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm - have been updated with better audio, video and gaming in mind over the last couple of years. Just about the only one you would think game when talking about is Research In Motion's BlackBerry platform.