According to an interview on Gamasutra, Nokia is going to launch its next generation of N-Gage games accross its S60 smartphone, possibly the N-Series only, in Spring next year. More interestingly, several N-Gage-like gaming smartphones will follow to see the light in 2008. Gregg Sauter, Nokia Games Publishing executive, mentioned that the gaming phone models will be Symbian S60-based and they will come with a landscape display and hardware accelerated graphics. Rumor says, to avoid another loss after the low sales of N-Gage, Nokia wants to see how the games do on general smartphones first before they present their new gaming cell phones.

This news would tend to tie in with the game “One: Who’s Next?” on display at E3 2006 which featured both a conventional vertical screen mode as well as a landscape mode (although the landscape mode wasn’t accelerated). Games would probably have to support two modes to begin with, as standard smartphones probably wouldn’t have graphics acceleration chips, but as time goes by S60 phone hardware would probably catch up so that even non-gaming models would be fast enough to run the “gaming-oriented” mode too. It wasn’t mentioned in the interview, but it’s also possible that Nokia is planning to eventually add graphics acceleration hardware to all its smartphones when the price is right.

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