Who remembers the N-Gage? Sold 3 million units

46 Comments

  1. chriscross1966

    Taco phone crew in da house!. Used to keep two spare batteries in the back of the case, was my introduction to satnav on a phone using a bluetooth GPS receiver (that conveniently used the same battery) and a cracked copy of Route66….

  2. GamingTrend

    Take out the battery to change the game? Perfect design, no notes. Ship it!

  3. onebowlwonder

    They also had the sequel resident evil 4 on this thing hahaha

  4. travisscottburgercel

    What is the name of this aesthetic?

  5. CyrusPanesri

    Shit me and my friend used to play cod multiplayer over Bluetooth across the common room in school. Also had a load of fakeout apps for symbian that could add background noises to calls and stuff. Good times.

  6. 2Scribble

    The gaming taco you had to take the battery out of to play xD

  7. LadyXexyz

    I loved it. It was my all in one thing. Yeah, taco phone. Who the fuck cares. It had my MP3s and I’d convert anime to watch it on the screen.

    “You did WHAT? That’d be so small! Why not watch it on your computer?”

    Because that shit was fucking CRAZY at the time. I had anime, a NES emulator, very legally obtained Java games and Tony Hawk was a regular in my game slot. It was the coolest shit.

    I miss when companies would take huge swings.

  8. Didn’t have an N-Gage but had the playstation phone (Sony Ericsson Xperia Play). It was my very first smartphone. I quickly realized I had made a mistake. There was very little official support for it after release, so it primarly became an emulation device for most people. Except the latency on the controller was terrible, which limited it mostly to turn based or otherwise slow games. Even something like Mario felt like you were covered in glue. Also it was real bad as a phone because it was on an older version of android with no hope of update.

  9. Heavy_Arm_7060

    Amazing how they designed to do so many things fairly badly and still sold that many units.

  10. yellowcoward

    I and every other Gamestop manager got these when they launched. Huge manager conference in Texas, we walk in to one of the larger conference rooms and there they are, a wall of stacked N-Gage boxes. You could hear the stifled laughter coming from all sides. I tried using it as my phone for like a week before bailing on it. I think we all did. Good old taco talkin’

  11. TerrorFirmerIRL

    It was a pretty cool gaming device. Aside from dedicated ngage games which were fairly impressive for the time there was a huge library of downloadable S60 games for it as well as emulators, apps, ports of games like doom, etc.

    I had one and think I only ever owned 2 actual cart games, the rest were all downloaded games. They weren’t quite the same quality of ngage games but lots of them were similar to GBA in quality.

  12. I remember a friend of mine brought his into school one day with a copy of Tomb Raider. It…didn’t leave a very positive impression.

  13. Had an n95 and an n85 (first smart phone to do oled screen, first nokia to support microusb!) and they had launched NGage2.0 which was a platform for Symbian s60 OS. Reset Generation was a multiplayer game that had cross platform support with PC. It was a great game, miss it. It was fun to have n95 in an era when US smartphones were underusing 3g service from att (iphone was only 2g) so using things like sling box on the train or tethering internet was really fast since no other smartphones were utilizing fast mobile bandwidth. When the iphone 3g came out, boy network congestion skyrocketed. It was enough to drive me from att to verizon and I got a droid. wild cellphone times 😀

  14. Virt_McPolygon

    And who remembers the Sidetalkin’ website?

    Edit: Wow it lives! So the speaker and mic were on the edge of the N-Gage so to use it as a phone you had to talk into the side of it. This spawned this website of people sending in photos of themselves talking into the side of ever-more ridiculous things.

    https://sidetalking.com/original/

  15. MyNameIsJesseG

    Weirdly one of the better versions of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater out there.

  16. PlatinumPlayer

    I own Spiderman 2 sealed on the N-gage 🤓

  17. Lopsided_Evening_129

    I was so excited for it, but never bought one. Ended up with a PSP and a DS, and was perfectly happy.

    I was that weird sub category of kid who was allowed a GameBoy, but never a console.

  18. SaintPwner

    Have one on my shelf, along with all my previous phones…I should take a photo of these.

  19. feedmeyourknowledge

    Malaysian kid in school had this when we very first even heard of them. Pretty sure he was the only person in the school to have one even after several months. Not only that he had cracked copies of shitloads of games.

  20. nukeman239

    I had the N gage QD. It was my first phone and trust me it was considered royalty since it was so different from anything else in the market.

  21. SmoothMarx

    Still have it in my drawer, and the QD as well.

    The iPhone before the iPhone (in Europe).

  22. gogul1980

    I was poor when it came out. But always gawked at it in gaming shops. Would have loved to own one

  23. Was great until I dropped it and it died. 🙁

  24. I remember wanting one of these so bad as a kid!

  25. MrsEsterhouse

    As a Palladium Books player from old it HAD to be THIS platform for a Rifts video game? An IP with arguably limitless potential for content. I still have not played Rise of Power feel like it’s too late now

  26. Ricksta777

    I do until a group of 3 men stole mine when I was like 14! Police did nothing

  27. bertmega

    I had one. I miss it. Countless hours wasting my employees time playing this on the shitter.

  28. DawgTactical93

    Who tf was making phone calls with that mf?! Fess up!

  29. methanol_ethanolovic

    I randomly met my mother’s friend on a train a while ago. Suddenly, he just whipped this thing out of his pocket, in a pristine condition, saying his other phone died and he had this lying in a drawer.

  30. I worked at an EB Games towards the end of that things life. Got to see the manager rip out the display unit it and literally throw it in the back room to be sent back to HQ to be recycled probably or sent back to Nokia

  31. steamliner88

    The device was bad and some design choises were insane (Sonic games on that narrow screen?), but the gamefaqs board was a Mecca for trolls. The N-gage my be as dead as it was useless, but the memory of taco-talking twats will live forever.

  32. yes1000times

    I recently read that the original design of the NGage keypads was based on goatse. I have no idea if that’s really true but I can’t unsee it now.

  33. I loved my n-gage so much. Tony hawks pro skater was amazing. It blew my mind. I’m easily pleased

  34. xenophonthethird

    I had no idea it sold 3M units. I would have believed 300k with all the derision it got.

  35. Wizdad-1000

    Imagine taking calls on that thing? The games were all java. Alot of work for those devs!

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