Remember The Taco Phone?

Опубликовано 23 сентября 2016, 23:24

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!


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[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
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[FURTHER READING]

"Play It Again, Nokia (For The Third Time)"
nytimes.com/2007/08/27/technol...

Fortune Nokia N Gage Review:
archive.fortune.com/magazines/...

GamePro Nokia N Gage Review:
web.archive.org/web/2007101219...

Paste Magazine Nokia N Gage Retrospective:
pastemagazine.com/articles/201...


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"The Ballad of MrMobile." Mobile Nations, 2016

"Beach" by JAM Studio, available at Premium Beat:
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