The N-Gage couples a mobile phone with a games console. Has Nokia managed to do this successfully? You'll have to read our Australian review to find out.

Nokia's selling the N-Gage primarily on its gaming prowess, aiming to become the trendsetter in wireless gaming. With that in mind, the N-Gage sports a very gameboy-like directional pad on one side, and the capability to add SD card games to the phone. This is achieved in a manner that makes us think that someone at Nokia doesn't like games or gamers very much at all.

	The dazzling dozen  Mobile phone reviews:  Kyocera 3245  Motorola A920  Nokia 3100  Nokia 7250  Nokia 8910i  Nokia N-Gage  Samsung SGH-C100  Samsung SGH-V200  Sharp GX20  Siemens MC60  Sony Ericsson T610  Sony Ericsson Z600

In order to insert a new game, you've got to remove the back, then remove the battery, slide in your game of choice, then reverse the process and switch the phone back on. The N-Gage will steadfastly refuse to even boot up without having a SIM card inserted, so we suspect it'll only be a very short matter of time before someone's chucked off a plane for having their N-Gage switched on in order to indulge in some harmless gaming fun.

To add insult to injury, by the time you've powered up the phone, re-entered your security code and gotten into the phone's menu structure, games are placed in the bottom right hand corner, almost as if they're an afterthought. However, you can customise the menu by moving icons around or changing them.

You can always just download games to the phone, but that's hardly a unique selling point, as most phones these days are compliant with the growing numbers of mobile Java games.

It's also seems quite odd to us that a phone with such a strong games pitch should have such an ordinary control interface. The directional pad works well enough, although those with larger hands may find it cramped and small, but the buttons double as the phone number keys, and thus aren't laid out in a manner where they're instinctively easy to reach or play with. It's almost as if the N-Gage were some kind of prototype phone; we can think of a number of improvements that would make a potential N-Gage 2 an appealing phone.

Nokia provided us with a copy of Pandemonium, a title that originally saw light of day on the Sony Playstation almost exactly nine years ago. It's a title well suited for a mobile platform, as it's easy to pick up and play, although the N-Gage version has been scaled back somewhat. It's still an impressive sight for a mobile platform, and although the vertically scaled screen looks a little odd, it's still visually ahead of anything on offer on Nintendo's competing Gameboy Advance platform. Any gaming platform lives and dies on the quality of its games, and the advantage provided by wireless/internet connectivity does give Nokia a theoretical edge; it'll be up to Nokia and its third-party games providers to make it all a reality. You can read more on the N-Gage's game library in our preview here.

Of course, the N-Gage is more than a games console - anyone who buys one is likely keen for the mobile phone features as well. Mobile phones being what Nokia does, you'd expect a high-quality device.

The voice quality is reasonably good, but for some reason Nokia has placed the speakers on the edge of the phone. This means that you have to hold the mobile edge-ways to your ear to make a call, which feels weird and looks odd.

The button layout is designed to be a compromise between a phone and a gaming device, and despite being slightly awkward for gaming purposes is easy to use as a mobile. The 5-way directional pad is on the left-side of the phone, and suffers from the usual problem of sometimes thinking you pressed an arrow key instead of the select button.

Below the directional pad are three dedicated hotkeys. The first one takes you to the music player - which wasn't functioning on our review sample - and the second one takes you to the radio function. This gives good, clear reception and allows you to preset up to 20 channels. You can choose to listen to the radio through the headset or through loud-speakers, but the headset must be plugged in, presumably because it's used as the aerial.

The third hotkey takes you to the menu. The menu has nine folders displayed, and you'll probably want to utilise the phone's ability to customise the menu because some of the choices are decidedly odd. For instance, the first icon is labelled "telephone", and selecting it takes you back to the standby screen. So does pressing the right softkey (which is labelled 'exit' here) and the end call button, so having an icon to do this seems spurious.

The messaging folder supports sending SMS, MMS and e-mail. When writing text the mobile has an edit hotkey next to the right softkey, which brings up a menu allowing you to manage the dictionary and change from alpha mode to number mode, insert a number or symbol, and change the language between English, French and German.

The mobile allows you to link at least five SMS messages together, while the MMS section allows you the choice of receiving adverts and other control mechanisms. The MMS function is easy to use, and allows you to record a sound clip on the spot to send, which is useful.

One useful feature that should be brought up is the 'help' function that's available on practically every page in the menu brought up by pressing the 'options' softkey. This is highly detailed, and certainly beats having to go through the manual every time you need to learn something.

The other menu functions are the standard ones you expect to be on a mobile, such as Calendar and profiles. Three folders provide access to other applications. 'Media' contains RealOne media player, access to the music features that are also available via the hotkeys, Composer and Services (which sends you online and allows you to save pages). One interesting applications is 'Screenshot', which runs in the background and allows you to make an image of a particular screen. We suspect this is designed particularly to send images of games (such as your high score) to a friend.

The 'Extras' folder contains the clock, notes, an applications folder, a log of your calls and data transfers, to-do list, and converter. There is also a Favourites folder where you can create shortcuts to your favourite applications, though we suspect this would be more useful on the main menu. The calculator included here has a better interface than normal, and also has the ability to store numbers in memory like a physical calculator.

The 'tools' folder contains access to various settings, Bluetooth, speed dial (with 8 available places), call divert and a function to check how much memory is left. The phone starts with 8,152 kb, and had 328 kb of free space when we got it.

The N-Gage is a unique device, at the moment. It offers games better than any other mobile we've seen, and Nokia will launch Games Arena on the same day as the handset is launched on October 7.

The games cost between AU$50-70, which are more than you'll pay to download games on another service, and essentially on par with games for Nintendo's Gameboy Advance. The games are better quality than standard mobile phone games because they come on an 8 or 16 Mb card, with 32 Mb cards promised. This gives games developers a great deal more scope than the normal 128Kb Java games that come with standard mobile phones.

The handset itself is quite expensive for a games console, but mid-range for a mobile phone. The N-Gage offers better games technology in the mobile arena than anything else out there at the moment, although we'd advise any potential buyers to take the unit for a test drive to see if they can overcome the unit's rather severe design shortcomings.

Nokia N-Gage
Company: Nokia
Price: AU$599
Distributor: Nokia
Phone:  1300 366 733

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