If there’s one thing that you can say about Nokia, it would have to be that the company has guts and determination. As announced earlier this year, Nokia will be attempting to resurrect its handheld game machine, the N-Gage, for another try at portable gaming stardom. A trial mobile game service will be launched to test the waters, and will run from February to sometime in the middle of 2007, according to a report on Gamasutra.
Jaakko Kaidesoja, Director of Games and Multimedia at Nokia, said, "The core of the Nokia games strategy is to make it easy for people to find, buy and play great quality mobile games and we’re excited to expand our relationship with Elisa to help make this possible. This pilot will help us further refine the N-Gage experience for our commercial launch later this year."
N-Gage made its first appearance in October 2003 and died a quick death because of the machine’s poor library of games and even poorer performance. Originally released as a hybrid portable game machine and cell phone, the device never caught on with the public–and for all intents and purposes–dropped completely from sight in 2005.
