N-Gage



"Anyone, anywhere."

The N-Gage was an interesting hybrid: it was a gaming cell phone, but its games came in cartridges like a regular handheld. Too bad it was so poorly designed: you had to open the back lid and remove its battery to swap games. The controls were clunky, the screen was tiny, the library was very limited, and to top it off, it was priced like a phone — so it cost multiple times as much as the massively popular GBA. After a disastrous launch, prices were slashed and a second model was quickly introduced to fix some of its issues, but by then its reputation was in shambles, while DS and PSP had just come out with specs that blew it out of the water. The name was later reused as a game download store for Symbian phones, but that's also long gone now.

While it is often mentioned in lists of "worst consoles ever", that's somewhat unfair: the N-Gage was quite ahead of its time (remember, this was long before smartphones became mainstream), and its fans swear that some of its games were actually pretty good.

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