Nokia Listens, Hooks Up With Zeemote
Wow, this is stinking *awesome* news! Hot on the heels of Sony Ericsson’s announcement that it would be offering the Zeemote as a bundled deal with its gaming phones, Nokia follows suit with an offer in Germany. The Zeemote JS1 controller will be offered in both online and offline channels of Nokia Germany, as well as bundled in special gaming packs. Jim Adams, VP of Sales at Zeemote stated, ‘…This and other announcements we have planned have the potential to extend and unlock the creativity of game and application development to a whole new level.”
There isn’t any official mention as to whether the Zeemote would be bundled with S40 or S60 phones, or which games, if any, would be preloaded in the gaming bundle, but rest assured we’ll be keeping a close eye on this one. Gameloft is currently developing Zeemote compatible games, and with Gameloft working its way through N-Gage, I’d love to see Zeemote support come to the N-Gage platform, for sure.
Bonus Link: The Nokia Games Summit takes place in Rome on October 29-30, so hopefully we’ll see more announcements there.
That is really good news.
However I don’t like the idea of Gameloft as the only ones doing games for N-gage with the Zeemote support.
I would like other developers to use the potential.
(I don’t need to mention that Gameloft plays their usual trick by pulling spinoffs of their games for the N-gage or that their games have ridiculous trials.)
This is excellent news!! I’m expecting much exciting gaming news from Nokia over the next 6 months.
yes. Why only gameloft. I think nokia should take a leaf out of apple here (its hard but had to mention!) why cannot we have various developers working for the same platform?
Cool! I have asked for a BT gamepad/controller for N-Gage on its feedback forum – I knew they were working on it one way or the other anyway and here is the proof.
If the Zeemote supported the HID Bluetooth profile, you could ALREADY have N-Gage, S60 and Java game support. That’s why you can control all these games with Bluetooth keyboards, because they’re HID compatible.
Alas, Zeemote isn’t HID compatible, so it only works with games written specially for it, which is daft.
Incidentally, here are some N-Gage games being played wirelessly on a TV using an HID-compatible Bluetooth keyboard:
http://www.allaboutngage.com/features/item/N-Gage__TV_Out__Home_Games_Console.php
Why can’t we have a joypad casing with BT keyboard components inside it? It would work with all existing games, because all S60 phones have built-in drivers for Bluetooth HID keyboards.
“why cannot we have various developers working for the same platform?”
N-Gage already has lots of publishers and developers working on it, Gameloft is just one of them. The only reason Gameloft is mentioned in the article is because they’re dealing directly with the makers of the Zeemote.