Posts filed under Games

Those of you longing for a better mobile gaming experience will be pleased to know that Nokia have now made the new N-Gage gaming service live on their web site. Currently only of any use for owners of Nokia N81, N82, and N95 phones, the N-Gage service will be rolled out to N73 and N93 owners in the coming months.

N-Gage, of course, used to be a phone in its own right, but after performing dismally, it was pulled by Nokia. The new N-Gage platform seeks to resurrect the concept of mobile gaming, but on existing phones, rather than on a dedicated gaming phone.

More details of the new N-Gage platform after the jump.

Samsung have announced the new Samsung SCH-B450 ‘free-folder’ phone. The SCH-B450 is another of Samsung’s high-end technological marvels that certainly has the wow factor. The first thing that grabs your eye is the form factor of the phone. The term ‘free folder’ coomes from the 180 degree swivelling design, which lets you use the phone in clamshell form, or swivel it round to play games. But it’s not just the form factor that’s impressive – in typical Samsung form, the SCH-B450 is packed to the gills with features.

More details and pictures of the Samsung SCH-B450 after the jump.

Nokia will announce their next generation mobile gaming platform at the forthcoming Games Developer’s Conference (GDC) on Monday 20th March. Nokia’s Director of Games Publishing, Gregg Sauter, will give a keynote speech at GDC mobile entitled ‘The Next Generation of Mobile Gaming’, in which he will reveal how Nokia’s next generation and SNAP Mobile gaming platforms will provide market defining solutions to the key issues and challenges faced by developers, operators and publishers today.

As Nokia said recently, N-Gage as a mobile phone is dead, but the technology inside it certainly isn’t, and will find its way into other Nokia mobile phones in the coming months. Sauter’s speech should provide more details on exactly what Nokia’s plans are.

[Source: Nokia]

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]

If it’s Java downloads you’re after for your mobile, then you might want to spend some time at the www.getjar.com web site. Be warned though – you could very easily find yourself spending hours here, as the site makes it so easy to pick from an endless variety of mostly free Java J2ME midlets. These apps will run on most phones, but just to be sure, you can even filter the huge list according to your phone.

I tried some of these gems out on my SonyEricsson S700i, and most worked without a hitch (though some didn’t, principally those that needed to connect to a server. This may be because a specific server was down, though, as most of the midlets needing Internet connection worked fine). Downloading onto the phone was simplicity itself, as the site provides the Java .JAR and .JAD files for downloading onto your PC (and then, of course, subsequent uploading onto your mobile), or lets you download directly onto your handset via WAP.