Nokia starts to shift N-Gage from console to platform

… the Finnish giant is now promising to build N-Gage’s gaming component into a raft of smart phones due to ship early next year following a September 2005 launch.

Essentially, the technology that lifted the N-Gage above Nokia’s handsets is now ready to be included in phones as well as consoles, the company claimed. In short, what made the N-Gage a console rather than a phone, as Nokia originally maintained, now makes it just another phone among thousands of others. So it really is about phones and not about consoles.