Goodbye, Nokia N-Gage

Nokia has announced that it will kill off its popular N-Gage games service in 2010, no new N-Gage games will be released and existing games will be available for sale till September 2010.
The N-Gage community website will also expire at the end of 2009. However, that doesn't actually mean that Nokia will pull out of the mobile gaming space altogether, as the Finnish mobile giant plans to release games via Ovi Store. Only trouble is, Nokia's Ovi Store isn't doing too well either, at least not when you compare it to Apple's app store. N-Gage also had trouble finding market share when it launched back in 2003.
"It's much more convenient to have one place to get all your mobile games, and this it what Ovi Store provides," said Nokia on the N-Gage blog. "Mobile gaming is one of the most popular activities in the Ovi Store, with games being the second most downloaded category for premium content." Did Nokia pull the plug on N-Gage because of its less than spectacular 2009? The company reported a loss of 1,377,023,154 USD ($1.3 billion) between July and September 2009. To add fuel to the fire, Nokia had made a profit of the same amount last year during the same period.
There are fifty-eight full game titles available for N-Gage. On the bright side the hideous N-Gage phones will disappear. The taco-shaped design of the handset was clumsy, to insert a game, users had to remove the phone's plastic cover and remove the battery compartment as the game slot was next to it. Another clumsy feature was the speaker and microphone being located on the side edge of the phone. This often resulted in many to describe it as if one was talking into a "taco phone" or "Sidetalking", or simply that they had one very large ear, because the user held the edge of the phone against the cheek in order to talk into it.
Despite the criticism, it is thought that the speakers were there for a practical reason: if placed elsewhere, the screen would get in contact with the cheek and become smudged. However, almost all other cell phones have the screen against the cheek when the user is talking. Despite the questionable practicality, gamers were still unwilling to talk in such an awkward manner.