Ngage launched the First Access edition recently, only available for owners of the Nokia N81. I’ve said before that I think a device-specific soft-launch is a terrible idea, and I stand by that. However, given the (probably) small number of N81 owners out there, I think it’s safe to say this is intentional to limit the number of people actually testing this out.
I’ve been playing with the application on my N81 8GB for a few days now, and I’ve got some rough first impressions to give you an idea of how its coming along, and whether or not you should really be salivating at the mouth for this on your N95 or N82 or whatever other Nseries handset you may be sporting.
Here’s the top 3 things that completely suck about N-Gage First Access…
1. The app is buggy as all get-out. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the list of known issues over on the forums . That’s a horrendously long list of known issues. How long has Nokia been working on the application?
2. Images show up in my gallery, and are therefore uploaded by ShoZu. This is a big issue for me, as I have ShoZu set to automatically upload images without confirmation. My Flickr account is now flooded with any image or avatar that my N-Gage application has downloaded. There’s no reason that an application from Nokia themselves should have this issue.
3. When you get a message during a game, there’s a neat little pop-up on the bottom of the screen. Awesome. Except for that I can’t do anything with it. If I want to go read it, I have to pause the game, back to the main menu, back out to the N-gage home screen to read it. This can easily take ~5 minutes, and is absolutely ridiculous. Why can’t I press a shortcut to automatically pause my game and go to the message? Or a setting somewhere to ‘allow interruptions’?
If you’re thinking, “those are all three fixed rather easily with future updates to the application, you dork!” then you get a cookie, because you’re exactly right. In my opinion, Nokia’s new N-gage platform has some SERIOUS potential to really be a smash hit in the mobile arena. The games thus far are pretty stellar, and I’m extremely tempted to buy the Creatures of the Deep and System Rush games already. However, the crux of this equation, in my opinion, is this application that Nokia has developed. It’s going to need some SERIOUS work before it should be released to the public (on purpose), and it is the only thing that I can see thus far that has the potential to bring the entire project crashing the ground.
