Remember The Taco Phone?
In 2003, Nokia declared war on Nintendo with the N-Gage, a Game Boy Advance lookalike with a Series 60 mobile phone inside. The conflict – to put it mildly – did not go in Nokia's favor. With a cumbersome design that required the owner to remove the battery in order to change games, the N-Gage wasn't exactly user-friendly, and with only a handful of available titles to the Game Boy Advance's 1,200, the N-Gage ecosystem hardly justified the device's $299 asking price. Worse still: the phone's earpiece was mounted on its spine, making for a bizarre look and feel when it came to voice calls and leading to the unfortunate nickname "Taco Phone." Needless to say, Nokia's N-Gage experiment did not go well. The company launched a sequel (the N-Gage QD) in 2004 and eventually repositioned N-Gage as a gaming platform that spanned its Symbian smartphone line, but it never gained the traction Nokia sought and the brand was shuttered in 2010. Today, the original N-Gage is a monument to the days when new form factors flooded a nascent mobile market, and a still-dominant Nokia led the charge to pack ever more functionality into the humble cell phone. Join MrMobile for the Nokia N-Gage Retro Review – and if you owned one of these (or even if you just wanted one) drop a comment below with your story! [SUBSCRIBE] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSOpcUkE-is7u7c4AkLgqTw?sub_confirmation=1 [ABOUT THIS VIDEO] MrMobile's Nokia N-Gage Retro Review was produced after several days with a retail Nokia N-Gage device purchased on Amazon. The device was used on T-Mobile US in Greater Boston, MA, US. [PRODUCTS IN THIS VIDEO] Nokia N-Gage http://mrmobile.tech/24 [FURTHER READING] "Play It Again, Nokia (For The Third Time)" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/27/technology/27nokia.html?_r=0 Fortune Nokia N Gage Review: http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355130/index.htm GamePro Nokia N Gage Review: https://web.archive.org/web/20071012194600/http://gamepro.com/gamepro/domestic/games/features/125748.shtml Paste Magazine Nokia N Gage Retrospective: https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/12/before-the-mobile-gaming-explosion-there-was-the-n.html [MUSIC] "The Ballad of MrMobile." Mobile Nations, 2016 "Beach" by JAM Studio, available at Premium Beat: http://www.premiumbeat.com/royalty_free_music/songs/beach [SOCIALIZE] http://facebook.com/themrmobile http://instagram.com/themrmobile http://twitter.com/themrmobile https://www.snapchat.com/add/mrmobilesnaps http://mrmobile.tech [DISCLOSURE] This post may contain affiliate links. See Mobile Nations' disclosure policy for more details: http://www.mobilenations.com/external-links