// Pocket Picks //

Due to our almost preternatural powers of news detection (and the fact that we spend almost every waking hour slumped infront of our laptops) we got wind of the N-Gage’s launch late last week, ahead of its official announcement.

Nokia has gone and caught up with us all by letting loose a press release about the launch and just in case you haven’t gleaned every printed fact about the service from our sister site, Pocket Gamer, already, we thought we’d break down a few of its essential features for you here.

For those of you that think we are talking about some sort of shuffling update to the maligned N-Gage taco/pastie (or any other baked snack that serves as a good cultural reference point for you) then you couldn’t be more wrong. The new N-Gage is not a device locked platform, it is essentially a service that will run on Nokia’s high end devices (Nokia N81, Nokia N81 8GB, Nokia N82, Nokia N95, and Nokia N95 8GB).

As such, the games are delivered in the time honored over the air download fashion that mobile games usually are and you can browse the titles you would like to buy online with your handset.

The other big selling point on this swing of the bat is that the N-Gage will have connected and community gaming right at its very heart with the N-Gage Arena. This is essentially a mobile take on Xbox Live’s template where each gamer has an online identity with an avatar which they can use to rack up N-Gage Points, add friends to their list for multiplayer games, communicate with other users via live chat and send and receive private messages in an instant messaging style interface.

But what about the games? Well, the new N-Gage seems to be doing its level best to both embrace what makes mobile gaming good, as well as push things forward. To that end, casual titles are out in force (something the previous N-Gage lacked somewhat) with titles like Block Breaker Deluxe, The Sims 2: Pets, Brain Challenge, World Series Poker: Pro Challenge and Mile High Pinball.

Then there are N-Gage exclusives such as Space Impact Kappa Base, System Rush Evolution and Hooked On: Creatures of the Deep. Then there’s One, which is a flashy looking 3D beat em up, and the ever mysterious Project White Rock which is claimed to be the most expensively produced mobile game ever.

So if you weren’t excited before, hopefully you are now. This is quite a big step for the industry and while the endless jostling for multimedia superiority goes on, Nokia seems to have found a very concise focus for tackling the lucrative gaming market. At any rate it looks like Nokia has a much more successful strategy than that it employed for the last N-Gage. Here’s hoping.