GDC08: N-Gage commercial launch due 'in the coming weeks'
Step-by-step approach to test the whole ecosystem
As you'd expect, Nokia and N-Gage are one of the main topics of conversation during the two-day GDC Mobile conference, with the company giving plenty of talks and having its key staff on site.
Which explains why we caught up with Jaakko Kaidesoja, who despite his rather florid title of head of New Experience, Nokia Play, fronts up the N-Gage business.
The full transcript of our interview will be published later on this week, but we thought it was worth highlighting the timeline for the full commercial release of the N-Gage platform as quickly as we heard it.
At present, the so-called First Access is only officially available for N81 devices (although, as you'd expect, hackers quickly got the service working with other Nseries devices such as the N95 and N82).
Obviously, given previous delays to the service, Kaidesoja was keen not to give too precise a date. "I think I made a mistake in the second half of 2007 announcing launch dates and then we missed them as we discovered some surprisingly difficult things," he said, rather candidly. "The commercial launch will be in the coming weeks. It's not far away."
As for feedback from the First Access, he said it had been positive. "We know it's not perfect yet and there are some features people want more of. Those are the things we want to check and get on the roadmap," he explained.
"The thing for consumers to understand is this is the beginning. The commercial roll-out will see more devices, more games and an update for the application with more features.
"What's important for us is to test the whole ecosystem – the client and the backend and the infrastructure – with thousands and ten of thousands of users. Not immediately blowing it up with millions. Therefore we need to take it step by step."
