Are You Ready to N-Gage?
by the Gadget Gals
We didn't buy a cell phone for our daughter until she was 16 and the excuse was that she was driving herself to school and needed it for safety reasons. Now three years later her cell phone is her lifeline on campus. She never goes anywhere without it and, as you might guess, that's not just for safety reasons.
Now here comes our thirteen year old son, and I can tell you what a thirteen year old needs and wants is changing these days. Believe it or not, it seems like every kid at his school has a cell phone. They aren't supposed to turn them on during school hours, but after a soccer practice that broke up early because of rain, I have to tell you that I was amazed at how many kids pulled cell phones out of their backpacks to call for a ride home. So suddenly for his thirteenth birthday gift we were in the market for a cell phone. And then we heard about the N-Gage from Nokia.
The N-Gage is a combination cell phone, game machine, FM radio, and MP3 player or, in other words, adolescent boy heaven. It carries a much heftier price tag than a GameBoy, but we decided to take the plunge and picked our phone up not long after it was released onto the market on October 7.
Carefully prying it from the box, I thought it was pretty amazing that this little 2.74 inches high by 5.26 wide by 0.8 inches deep device could actually do all the things it was purported to do. At 4.83-ounces, it is only a little bit heavier than some mobile phones. But having grown up in a house of gadgets, my son has none of this gee-whiz kind of reverence and quickly had the charger plugged in so that it was ready to go within a couple of hours. I had been concerned how we were going to get it going since we had not been able to stop in at our cellular phone service store. Fortunately it came with a free SIM from T-Mobile along with 30 days free service for both phone service and online gaming so we were up and running within 5 minutes of inserting the card inside the phone. (What a brilliant marketing ploy by T-Mobile - it was like opening the bike box and finding out that it was already magically put together at midnight on Christmas Eve.)
That concern out of the way, at least for the moment, my son quickly began testing out all the functions. The phone works great although it is a little awkward because you speak into the narrow edge of the N-Gage, not the front face. This didn't seem to bother him at all and, if it does down the road, there's also a built-in speakerphone. It also came bundled with a stereo headset. The headset, we discovered, is a must have for the FM Radio which uses the headset as an antenna - meaning you always have to use the headphones to hear the radio - something my son found a little disappointing - but I thought of it as a quiet plus for Mom.
Those two functions out of the way, we inserted a memory card (beware, another expense) and got busy figuring out how to download some of his music through the USB plug to the MP3 player. Using the included CD, we found downloading easy, and when we listened to the music, the tone quality was great.
Last, but certainly most importantly, we tackled the game facility. The N-Gage sports a 2-inch-diagonal backlit screen that displays 4,096 colors at a resolution of 176x208. On the left is a directional thumbpad. A backlit dial keypad on the right. These as well as other function buttons all serve as the game controls. Unfortunately, in order to insert one of the MultiMediaCard (MMC) games, users must open the back, remove the battery, insert the game, replace the battery, and pop the cover back on. Fortunately, we had read about this in the pre-reviews so it wasn't a big surprise. For any gamer who has been at it a while (READ - my son), it shouldn't be much of a problem, but we are going to see if this becomes a problem once the N-Gage gets out on the road with him a bit. The graphics - always his standard -- do seem to meet or surpass his expectations and I thought they were as good or better than his GameBoy Advance - my standard for these kind of small devices.
The other very cool thing that this phone can do is set up head-to-head games between two N-Gage s so they can compete wirelessly via the built-in Bluetooth connection. Because we don't know anyone else with an N-Gage at this point, we were only able to test this out at the store. But it was great fun. Not enough to make us a two N-Gage family at this point, but I could see a future where kids could compete with each other while on long car rides using this kind of capability.
The only other issue is battery time. We only got about 4 hour of game time on a single charge. Just enough for most plane rides, but that number goes down when you play music at the same time. We haven't tested it "in the field" other than rides in the backpack or pants pocket, but this device is for the more sophisticated gamer whom, we hope, won't go into withdrawal if the N-Gage runs out of juice.
All-in-all a rather expensive foray into the world of cell telephones, but in the pantheon of birthday gifts this seems to qualify so far as one of the best ever.
Product Details
N-Gage
http://www.nokia.com
$299 for base unit, see your cellular phone company for information on monthly service, memory cards are also extra
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