Third time is often a charm in the technology industry -- go ask Microsoft. For Nokia, a road less traveled appears to be the order of the day when it comes to continuing its N-Gage mobile gaming platform, however.

The cell phone giant announced this week it would not build N-Gage smartphone number three. Instead, the company will port the underlying technology of the N-Gage platform to other smartphones built on the Symbian operating system and Series 60 interface.

Once, Twice, Not 3X
Nokia entered the mobile gaming arena a couple of years ago with the original N-Gage—a hybrid device that could serve as a phone, PDA, and games platform. When the poorly designed smartphone failed to catch on, the cell phone giant introduced a follow-up, N-Gage QD, the following summer.

Although Nokia fixed many of N-Gage’s problems with N-Gage QD, the new model offered only moderately improved gameplay. It too received lukewarm receptions from the public and the pundits.

This past March, when Nokia gaming division head Gerard Wiener said the company would go back to the drawing board for another crack at N-Gage, the industry assumed he meant a go at developing N-Gage smartphone number three.

The failures of N-Gage and N-Gage QD lead Nokia down another, unexpected, path.

"Over the past two years, we've seen the mobile gaming market grow by leaps and bounds both in terms of market interest and customer expectations. With the N-Gage platform, we've been able to deliver a superior gaming experience to mobile gamers, but only on a small range of devices," Wierner said recently.

Nokia will leave behind the ‘build it and they will come' of the movie Field of Dreams, which hasn't work so well for something more along the lines of ‘if you won't come to us, we'll bring it to you.’ Better gaming becomes a default rather than a hardware purchase option.

Numbers Game
Of all the mobile handset company's Nokia is the best positioned to do just that. The dominant cell phone and smartphone vendor is also the developer behind the most popular smart device interface, Series 60.

As Wiener pointed out, "Now we want to expand rich, connected mobile gaming across the Nokia smartphone range. In 2005, we expect to sell 25 million smartphones and we see the global smartphone market exceeding 250 million devices in 2008."

Make better than average (though not necessarily spectacular) mobile gaming available to a wider variety of handsets and the wireless industry could see increases in those data dollars that are so important -- especially to carriers –- nowadays, as voice quickly turns into a commodity. There's money in game sales and downloads as well as getting people to use their operator’s networks more by enabling them to play against one another wirelessly.

"We can continue with our N-Gage offering while helping to drive the adoption of mobile connected gaming at a broader level," continued Wierner.

Nokia won't release the first smartphones to support N-Gage style gaming until the first half of next year. The company plans to introduce an application development environment for the technology during the fourth quarter, to give developers a head start.

It did not say whether or not Series 60 smartphones from other manufacturers would one day be compatible with the new mobile gaming solution.