Nokia spent some time discussing the future of their N-Gage mobile gaming platform at 3GSM last week. The N-Gage as a mobile phone was killed off last year. However, N-Gage as a mobile gaming platform, incorporated into other Nokia phones, will live on. In an interview with GamaSutra, Jani Karlsson (Nokia's Senior Manager for N-Gage) discussed how Nokia will improve the tools used by content developers to create N-Gage games, make the N-Gage more powerful as platform, and revealed that Nokia will be "announcing quite a few things at GDC [Game Developer's Conference]" next month.

Read more on the future of the N-Gage after the jump.

[Source: Gamasutra]

The Future of Nokia's N-Gage

Because of Nokia's forthcoming GDC announcements, Karlsson couldn't say much more about the N-Gage. When pushed about the possibility of an N-Gage smartphone, he said "I wouldn't go that far. There's going to be a platform. There hasn't been a brand announcement of yet."

As Nokia have already said that N-Gage technology will find its way into new Nokia phones, my guess is that some of those phones will be pitched very firmly as games machines the same as Sony Ericsson's current Walkman-branded phones are pitched as mobile music machines. Whether Nokia chooses to brand the phone as an 'N-Gage phone' is irrelevant to the phone's game-playing abilities: the N-Gage hardware will still be in there, it just depends whether Nokia wants to shout about it or not!

The problem Nokia has, of course, is that 'N-Gage' became an extremely unpopular brand. Despite being a bold and innovative attempt at providing a serious gaming platform on a mobile phone, Nokia handled it badly. The original N-Gage was badly designed to the point of being unusable, and Nokia over-hyped it to such a degree that it was doomed to fail (think Motorola ROKR). So although a new 'Nokia N-Gage phone' would clearly signal to the world that this was indeed a mobile gaming phone, it would also instill cynicism in the very people Nokia would prefer actually bought the phone. In contrast, Sony Ericsson's 'Walkman' brand has always been tightly aligned with portable music, and good quality, so branding their phones with 'Walkman' was a no-brainer.

My guess is that Nokia will effectively release an N-Gage 3 smartphone, but brand it as a Nokia Multimedia phone that plays really good games, thanks to the N-Gage technology inside. In other words, all the cool technology of N-Gage without the negativity associated with the N-Gage brand. Perhaps they'll even be really wacky and call it the Nokia N100?!

More details, of course, in a month's time at the Game Developer's Conference. We will naturally keep you posted.