- [Michael] In October of 2003, I looked like this.
And mobile phones looked like this.
Well, at least one of them did.
I'm Michael Fisher and this is the Nokia N-Gage,
better known as the taco phone
and it's one of the most iconic misfires
in mobile technology.
This is a Mr. Mobile Retro Review.
(upbeat electronic music)
Looking back on this crazy phone with 13 years of hindsight,
it's easy to wonder what Nokia was thinking.
But this wasn't just a flight of fancy
from a no-name company,
it was a calculated attack
by the world's leading mobile phone manufacturer
against the world's leading portable gaming company.
Nokia built the N-Gage to steal mobile gaming share
from Nintendo's Game Boy Advance.
And while the idea of combining gaming
and cellphones was a good one,
it was also ahead of its time.
First, while I've always thought the N-Gage
was pretty good-looking,
its Frankensteinian roots as a gaming deck
built by a phone company are evident.
The portrait-style display stuck in the middle
of a landscape-oriented device,
the mushy numeric keyboard that tried to double
as a gaming keypad just doesn't quite work.
Games built for the N-Gage shipped on MMC cards
and you had to open the whole phone up
to switch titles, including removing the battery.
In one of the funniest reviews I've ever read,
Fortune compared the process to field stripping
a rifle at night while blindfolded.
The N-Gage was also expensive at about 300 bucks,
three times the Game Boy Advance's price at the time.
Meanwhile, it was lighter and cheaper-feeling
in the hand than most Nokias of the era.
And, yeah, the edge-mounted earpiece and microphone
meant that to use it as a phone,
you held it like this.
In a day when vastly more people talked than texted,
it was only a matter of time
before the taco phone nickname was born.
Nokia estimated it would sell six million of these
by the end of 2004,
but it only managed to ship one million to retailers
in that time.
Despite later spawning a successor
and then transforming into a game platform
that ran on many Nokia phones,
N-Gage was a failure.
But in the weird world of nostalgia,
failure often carries a peculiar kind of luster.
When I announced on Twitter that this video was coming,
people came pouring out of the woodwork
to share their fond memories,
most of whom never even owned an N-Gage.
Using it in 2016 is delightfully strange.
As mushy as the keypad is, it's not bad for texting.
Once I got over the weird sensation
of using a numeric pad on a landscape device,
I was pretty speedy.
Oh, and as a button nerd,
I love those dedicated function keys for menu,
MP3 player, and FM radio.
Some useful features are also hiding
within the Symbian 6 software,
like a unit converter, a screenshot function,
and an app that lets you compose your own ringtones,
at your own risk.
And you know, for all the flak that controls get,
I found the keypad pretty easy to get used to.
This game is called Operation Shadow,
one of 58 titles eventually released for the N-Gage.
As you can see, the graphics aren't bad, considering.
And the N-Gage offered multi-player via Bluetooth as well,
so if somebody else had an N-Gage,
you could play with them from across the room.
Most other handhelds at the time
required you to use a cable.
As PC Mag put it in its 2003 review,
there were some great ideas here.
The failures came mainly in execution, strategy,
and a complex set of other challenges
better covered elsewhere.
I'll drop some links in the description
to some of the better stories on this.
The N-Gage is a monument to a time when phone-makers
were more intrepid
and a crazy new design seemed to come out of Nokia
every week.
And it wasn't just about aesthetics.
This was also an era when phones
were sprouting more and more features.
The N-Gage was a mobile phone,
gaming deck,
personal organizer,
media player,
and browser all in one.
Today, that describes almost every mobile phone,
but 13 years ago, cramming all that into one device
was something only a few companies were doing
and none of them did it with the brazen boldness
that Nokia did.
Thanks for memories, N-Gage.
You just showed up too early to the party.
Hey, remember that time Motorola built a banana phone?
If you like Retro Reviews,
check out Mr. Mobile's Moto RIZR Z8 video
and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss
two new videos every week.
Until next time, thanks for watching
and stay mobile, my friends.