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Ilkka Raiskinen on N-Gage, and more

Nokia's games supremo tells all

World without Wires

The other problem which the N-Gage faces, of course, is one which consumers and publishers alike may well come to regard as the single greatest stumbling block for the platform - namely the ludicrously high cost of the GPRS data transmissions used for N-Gage Arena and other online functions. Raiskinen is adamant that Nokia is working with the rest of the industry to try to solve this problem - which could make playing online titles on N-Gage Arena prohibitively expensive in many parts of the world. But he can offer only assurances, with no concrete details of how the costs will be driven down to be found.

"That's something that the whole industry is addressing, because everybody wants to increase the usage of wireless communications on the telecommunications side," he assures us. "Nokia is really committed to work to solve that, as are the carriers, and I personally feel, based on the discussions I've been having with the carriers and operators and service providers, I think we are all saying the same, and we will solve it - we want to bring GPRS to the masses."

Bringing GPRS to the masses would certainly be a major step down the road to bringing N-Gage to the masses - but that's a road down which some genuinely positive steps are being taken. Raiskinen and his team are under no illusions about how tough the task they face is going to be, however.

"First of all, of course we need to prove that we are serious about this business - we are willing to learn to and we are willing to continue to develop better games," says Raiskinen of the challenges facing the company in the run up to E3 next month. "Our challenge is of course in creating an organisation and environment that is somehow unique, so that we are different from the old Nokia but we are also different from the companies that are out there with the current generation of devices."

"Of course, for us the critical thing is to build and increase the installed base as fast as possible, because in the long run, the question is how fast you can achieve the installed base and how fast you can create a sustainable ecosystem on top of that."

Building a game hardware platform is easy, after all. Nokia now has one which should appeal to consumers; this, in effect, is where the real work starts. As Finland's finest shoulders the mammoth task of building N-Gage up to a position of strength in the short months before the arrival of Sony PSP and Nintendo DS, there's little doubt that they're the underdogs - but they've shown that they learn fast, and they claim to be very patient, both virtues which can go a long way in the games industry. The story of the N-Gage is still only beginning.

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