Nokia Confirms N-Gage 2.0; EA Mobile & Gameloft Committed

Nokia has officially confirmed that its N-Gage 2.0 mobile gaming platform will launch this year, following last week's report that the company was quietly holding a series of developer workshops to show off its new mobile gaming technology.

The news, coming from Nokia's official N-Gage blog, initially mentioned a September release date, but the post has since been edited to remove mention of any specific launch window. In an interview with Mobile Entertainment magazine, Nokia's head of Games Jaakko Kaidesoja all-but confirmed that full details on the new N-Gage initiative would be revealed at GDC next month.

"One of the main events for us is GDC in San Francisco in early March and that's really where you can expect some announcements," he said. "We will be present at 3GSM for various meetings, but we are gearing up to have more information at GDC."

Kaidesoja also reiterated that Nokia's new N-Gage initiative is all about an entire line of high-end phones, instead of a single gaming device.

"We're working on gaming ergonomics across our range, but there are no plans for new a N-Gage device at the moment," he explained. "For sure it's a hot topic and everyone wants to know about it, but first and foremost we want to bring the new platform to market and make sure it works across a range of devices."

Additionally, a follow-up post on Nokia's Future Watch blog specifically singled out Gameloft and EA Mobile as publishers pledging support for launch:

"We expect EA Mobile and Gameloft to bring a number of top-selling, award winning titles to our platform between for launch. They aren't the only ones, as throughout the year we will continue to make exciting announcements of other leading publishers adding their titles to our games catalogue."