The Nokia N-Gage and the Noble Art of Sidetalking

Nokia announced the N-Gage on 4 November 2002 and released it on 7 October 2003 at $299, or £250 in the UK. It was a mobile phone and a handheld games console in one curved plastic shell, and it was designed to take on the Game Boy Advance. It did not take on the Game Boy Advance. In its first UK week it sold fewer than five hundred units against a Nintendo machine outselling it roughly thirty to one.

The Screen Was the Wrong Way Round

The display was 2.1 inches, 176 by 208 pixels, and oriented in portrait. Taller than it was wide. Every other handheld console of the era was landscape, because games are landscape, because eyes are landscape. The Register’s review reported that the result was bent backs and squinting eyes.

Changing a Game Required Surgery

To swap cartridges you powered the device off, removed the back cover, pulled out the battery, pushed down a catch, and released the card. Then reversed the sequence. Contemporary reviewers documented this because it seemed impossible that it was true.

Nokia knew. When the N-Gage QD arrived in April 2004 at $199, its press release advertised, as a headline feature, that the cartridge could be hotswapped without removing the battery. There is no more complete admission of a design failure than a follow-up product boasting that you no longer have to disassemble it.

Sidetalking

Because the face of the device had to carry both game controls and a numeric phone keypad, the earpiece and microphone went on the narrow top edge. To take a call you therefore held the N-Gage sideways against your head, with the body of it jutting out at ninety degrees like a slice of pizza you were listening to.

Here is the crucial fact, and the one that lifts this from a design flaw to folk art. Sidetalking was Nokia’s own term. The company named the posture. It appears in academic literature on the device as company language, not as a jeer coined by critics.

Cabel Sasser, co-founder of the software company Panic, built a website collecting photographs of people sidetalking, written in the voice of an unhinged superfan. It expanded to people holding other objects to the sides of their heads, including full-size games consoles and cereal boxes. Sasser has explained his position with real generosity: he did not want to outright mock the thing, because he knew people had worked hard on it, but at the same time it is inherently funny.

Nokia then paid him five thousand dollars to promote the QD. The company hired the man running the parody site to advertise the model that abolished the joke. We have read a great many corporate marketing decisions and this remains our favourite.

The Quote

In June 2003, four months before launch, Nokia’s entertainment chief Ilkka Raiskinen sized up the competition for the press. GameBoy is for 10-year-olds, he said. If you are 20 or 25 years old, it is probably not a good idea to draw a GameBoy out of your pocket on a Friday night in a public place.

The Game Boy Advance proceeded to outsell the N-Gage roughly thirty to one in the United Kingdom, in public, on many Friday nights.

The Numbers, Handled Carefully

Nokia targeted six million units. In November 2005 multimedia head Anssi Vanjoki stated plainly that he had said they needed to sell six million in three years, that they sold one-third of that, and that changes were needed. Chief executive Jorma Ollila had already conceded in February 2004 that sales were in the lower quartile of the bracket they had as their goal, which is the finest euphemism in this entire article.

You will often read that the N-Gage sold five thousand units. That number is real and badly mangled in retelling: it was the US retail figure for week one only. Nokia countered at the time with a claim of 400,000 shipped worldwide in a fortnight, and shipped is doing heavy lifting in that sentence. Lifetime sales are reported at two million by Vanjoki in 2005 and above three million by the New York Times in 2007, which called it, correctly, the taco-shaped video game-cellphone hybrid.

The Verdict

Western production ended on 26 November 2005. The N-Gage name returned as a software service and Nokia killed that too, announcing the end of new games in October 2009 and closing the service the following September.

It deserved better in one specific respect. The idea of one pocket device that plays games and makes calls was completely correct, and every phone you have owned since has proved it. Nokia simply arrived with the right idea, the wrong shape, a screen rotated ninety degrees from usefulness, and a cartridge slot underneath the battery. Then it named the resulting posture, in public, on purpose.