@Said it before, I'll say it again

"Nokia should focus on what they're good at, hardware."

The point is that the first N-Gage, and indeed it's sequel demonstrated that outside of their comfort zone, they're not that good at hardware or ergonomics at all.

The original announcement had much to properly scare Nintendo - a company with loads of experience in producing competitively priced hand held consumer electronics that sold in hundreds of millions was going to produce a games platform. More than Sony, Microsoft or just about anyone else, they should have had the skills to produce something to rival the best that Nintendo could produce.

Instead we got the N-Gage, which was so clearly unsuited to mobile gaming and was badly compromised as a phone. It's true that the desperate attempt at leveraging old-school mobile phone economics against gaming had a big part to play (what's that coming over the hill? It's the iPhone!), but the phone that they released showed exactly where they were heading and the gaming community weren't fooled.

If the hardware had been up to scratch, we might have seen some killer titles, but it was a disaster.