I was thankfully able to obtain an ‘Early Access’ release of the Nokia N-Gage Service software for my Nokia N95. This software was really only meant for the N81, but a simple hack allows it to be used with almost any Nseries phone. Below are screenshots of the N-Gage service software.

For reference, here’s my home screen:

First of all, as you can see Nokia went ahead and totally ripped off XBox Live - and that’s a good thing. Sony could have done something similar to PSN, but apparently they thought they were good enough to do their own thing…which so far is not much. We’ve got a full fleged gamertag with gamerpic and reputation, as well as gamerpoints, or as they call them, N-Gage points.

And as you can see under ‘My Profile’, Gaming History and status.

Here you can see where you change your status.

Here is the points break-down.

And here’s some more stuff you can do.

Now I find all of this to be very impressive. Because of how dominant Nokia is in the world, this should have no problem taking off. It’s the U.S. that might be getting the short-end of the stick. Not many Americans know about Nokia hardware because of what they have to go through to get released here, plus for some reason people are so obsessed with iPhones. I would love to see Sony or Nintendo integrate this in a future handheld.

I have only played one game, and it was pretty impressive. It wasn’t actually an N-Gage game, but it was a game showing off what the device can do. There are three trial games I have that I’ll be installing over the weekend. I’ll be back next week with write-up on those.

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