Mobile gaming is seen by many as the next big thing, as phones become more powerful and come with colour screens. People are going to be spending millions of pounds to play games on their mobiles by next year, say experts. “This has been a very good year for mobile gaming,” said games consultant Robert Tercek.
No. 1 mobile phone maker Nokia, planning an aggressive push into video gaming, on Tuesday said it has signed a deal to acquire some assets of Japanese game maker Sega Corp. dedicated to networked game play. Nokia will use the SNAP technology for wireless game matching for its N-Gage phone/game deck combo device, set to be released worldwide on Oct. 7.
RealNetworks on Monday unveiled RealOne for SprintPCS, its first streaming media service to wireless phones, in the company’s latest move to boost its subscription revenue. The move marks the first time a branded, audio and slide-show service with major content brands has been launched on a big U.S. wireless carrier, RealNetworks said. For RealNetworks, the product marks the most significant push by the company yet to move its streaming media services from PCs onto portable devices such as phones.
Content providers like i-mode because it’s easy to program for — the format is nearly identical to regular Web pages — and they get 86% of the carrier’s take from content sales. Also important, i-mode runs on upgraded wireless networks, known as 2.5G or GPRS, that offer faster, always-on connections. What’s the attraction? Unlike the often-shoddy WAP offerings of a few years back, i-mode is a tightly woven, easily navigable package of preselected services.
Yamaha Corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of musical instruments and a leader in digital audio, announced today that it will expand its “Ringtone@YAMAHA” ringing melody distribution service in China giving customers using CDMA mobile phones of China United Telecommunications Corporation (China Unicom) a vast choice of different melodies for their handset ringers. The service to distribute harmonic 16- and 40-tone ringing melodies nationwide will begin on July 1, 2003, permitting China Unicom CDMA mobile phone subscribers.
Heikki Tenhunen President of Nokia Japan states, “Nokia welcomes Enfour joining Nokia’s developers’ community with its “UniFEP for Communicator” for Nokia 9210i Communicator. This kind of activity really proves its openness of Symbian technology bringing exciting business opportunities for independent software developers.
