racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

The N-Gage, Nokia’s gaming phone, is dead!

Blame it on poor engineering, and perhaps a failed marketing effort.  Or maybe gamers just prefer better-performing, better-playing, more popular, or just downright more cool-looking gadgets like the Sony PlayStation Portable.

Even the N-Gage QD, the updated version of the doomed phone, didn’t quite make the cut.

Nokia says it will be integrating its gaming software into the Series 60 Symbian platform.

My take on the matter: Nokia should stick to its forte–which is producing easy-to-use (read: dummy-proof) and useable phones.  The gaming platform should be a secondary concern.  After all, with the Series 60 (and even the lower-end Series 40) platform already having mobile java support, this should be adequate for games that are to be played on a mobile phone.

The word for gadgets (especially phones) in the future is convergence.  Phones now have cameras, MP3 players, and what-have-you.  Soon they’ll come bundled with the kitchen sink!  But a gadget that has everything may end up being an under-performer, especially in resource-intensive and design-sensitive applications such as gaming.

Want a mobile gaming device?  Go get yourself a PSP.

I posted this on DIGG: Legend of the Green Dragon – remember the good ol’ BBSing days?

Legend of the Green Dragon (LoGD) is a web-based remake of the Legend of the Red Dragon network fantasy RPG very popular in the golden days of BBSes back in the 90’s. While telnet-BBS incarnations of LORD still do exist to this very moment, a web-based interface sure rocks. Who said online RPGs need gigabytes of video RAM to run?

Here’s the LoGD site.  This is related to my blog post regarding BBSing, Fidonet, and text-based RPGs.