Revenge of the N-Gage

Released late last year, Nokia’s original N-Gage was an ambitious fusion of portable devices. It was a browser-enabled cell phone with some light PDA features, an MP3 player, an FM radio, and a putative Game Boy-killer. Unfortunately for anyone unlucky enough to have bought one, it was also a total trainwreck of engineering, design, user interface, and software.

You have to give Nokia some credit for perseverance, though, because less than a year later, they've released a redesigned version called the N-Gage QD. While it's better than the original—a metric so low it's barely worth mentioning—it still has some serious flaws.

The original's two biggest problems have both been fixed. The N-Gage's cartridge slot was originally hidden under the battery compartment, which meant you had to remove the battery in order to swap games. It was a design decision so baffling that it seemed more like a purposeful act of audience-alienating performance art.

The QD now features a proper cartridge slot along the bottom edge, so users may hot-swap games at will. Both the slot and the cartridges are tiny, however, so for anyone with normal adult fingers or, God forbid, meaty adult fingers, retrieving a game is like fishing a dime out of a crack in the side of your couch.

The original N-Gage suffered from another crucial design flaw: you had to hold the phone with the skinny edge to your head, so that it looked like a giant robotic ear. Rising to the challenge, the Nokia marketing department spun this terrible idea as a hip new feature, which they infamously dubbed, “Sidetalkin'."

Needless to say, Sidetalkin' did not become an international craze. It did however, become the subject of at least one Web site devoted to mocking it. Thankfully, the Sidetalkin' experiment is officially over. You hold the QD just as you would any other cell phone known to man.

Some features have been removed rather than fixed. The QD includes neither the MP3 player nor the FM radio tuner of the original. The removal of these features allows the QD to be slightly smaller than its predecessor, but it also means that the unit is less ambitious overall—it's now just a cell phone and a game player. As a cell, it's decent enough, though a little bulky. The unit comes with a built-in XHTML browser and the ability to download and run Java-2 based applications and games.

As a game machine, the QD is exactly the same as the original. Both are more powerful than the Game Boy Advance. The QD can handle Playstation 1-level 3D graphics, and features a fully backlit screen that's much brighter than the side-lit GBA screen. The screen has an unusual portrait rather than landscape orientation, however, which gives many games an odd, cramped feeling. The unit is Bluetooth-enabled for multiplayer gaming, but not many games support the N-Gage Arena online service. More games, such as Pocket Kingdom, will support the Arena in the coming months.

Like the original N-Gage, the QD lacks any kind of external volume or mute switch. Users must set the volume in software independently for each game—an almost inexcusable pain. The quality of available games is also substandard at this point. The N-Gage game library has nowhere near the depth or quality of the GBA.

The QD is much better than its predecessor, but has miles to go before it's good. It remains a somewhat clunky phone combined with a game player that can't compare to the Game Boy Advance, never mind the upcoming Nintendo DS or Sony PSP.

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