MGF 2008: Handset makers talk mobile games

It's the afternoon of the second day of Mobile Games Forum now, and we've got a panel to talk handsets.

Nokia and Sony Ericsson you know, while Qualcomm is also represented in the form of Mike Yuen, who heads up the company's BREW platform activities.

We start by asking what are the best-selling devices? Are smartphones doing well, and are smartphone users buying more games?

Peter Ahnegard from Sony Ericsson is first up.

"Games are making the majority of revenue for us," he says, referring to content sales on Sony Ericsson's Fun&Downloads portal.

Then it's Mark Ollila from Nokia, who starts by talking about the "radical change" in Nokia this year.

"Previously we were segmented into different device groups, with different focus on those device groups. Now Nokia is Devices, Services, Software and Markets. And the Services element has been elevated very much. Nokia is becoming an Internet company, a services company."

Ollila gives some stats on Nokia handset sales for 2007. The company took a 40 per cent market share in the fourth quarter of the year, selling 133 million handsets in that period. Focusing purely on smartphones (sorry, 'multimedia computers'), Nokia sold 38 million Nseries handsets during 2007.

Jumping on a bit, here's an intriguing snippet: Ollila says Nokia is interested in doing more in Java games as well as N-Gage, on a "first-party" basis. It's not immediately clear whether that means Nokia has plans to become a Java games publisher though.

Now it's Yuen's turn, to give the Qualcomm perspective.

"Everyone realises that services are the next big thing," he says. "You can only evolve the APIs and the tools so far, but to take it to the next level, it's about creating game services. What we're doing is similar to what Nokia are doing."

So, the next question is what's going to happen in 2008 with handsets? Will it all be touchscreens and hardware acceleration? Ollila says Nokia will launch a bunch of Nseries handsets (as you'd expect), and he says the volume in GPS-enabled handsets is growing well, with Nokia's mapping service proving popular. "And we also announced late last year that we're looking at touchscreens as well," he says.

He doesn't say anything on how important GPS will be for gaming though.

Ahnegard agrees with a lot of that, and also says if you want a sneak peek at the future of handsets, look to South Korea. Sony Ericsson has a dedicated division making phones for that market. They probably have holograms and rocket fuel, I daresay. Oh, it's more about the user interface, he explains.

"In the West, the UI is about the traditional nine boxes [icons], but over there we have user interfaces with space environments and lots of planets, which is what people like there, and much more customisation."

I wasn't far off with that rocket fuel gag, eh?

He also says 3D hardware acceleration will be more important, and will appear in more Sony Ericsson handsets.

"For this year, it's maybe not coming down from the high-end devices, but definitely in 2009," Ahnegard says.

Yuen says Qualcomm is looking wider than just the phone.

"Instead of viewing the phone as the centre of the universe, so we'll have a phone at the centre and add all these other things into it, we're looking at putting our technology into consumer electronics devices. Be that a TV or anything else," he reveals. "So instead of a phone where a camera's added to it, why not have a digital camera and add these things from the reverse direction?"

Now onto the services side - all three companies are placing more of an emphasis on launching services this year. Ollila and Ahnegard both talk about openness, and how although both companies are launching their own Web 2.0 and games services, they want to be open to others too.

For example, Nokia won't make you upload photos to its own service if you'd rather put them on Flickr. They haven't been stressing the gaming elements, though.

Yuen throws a different spin on things, wondering if in a few years time, people will buy mobile games as an add-on to console games - so you'd be sold a 'licence' to play FIFA, and for a quid or two extra a month, would also get the mobile version.

Now a good question: will N-Gage be launched for Sony Ericsson handsets?

"We're gonna focus on getting it working on our handsets first, and then we'll look at the opportunities elsewhere after that," says Ollila. And, as we all know, it's proving quite a task getting it working on Nokia's handsets...

Ahnegard says there could be closer collaboration between Sony Ericsson and Nokia, but no, they don't seem likely to launch N-Gage.

I ask a question: how do you make a handset good for gaming, at the same time that it's good for music, for photography, for mobile TV and so on?

When I play with the D-pad on my Nokia N81, it's too easy to slip off the D-pad and hit the music buttons, switching to the MP3 player application. How do you avoid this kind of problem?

Ollila says that the N-Gage SDK allows developers to actually turn off the music keys while you're playing, so this shouldn't be a problem.

Ahnegard admits that some handsets aren't so good for gaming, but others are much better. "It's tricky, but we are getting better at it," he says.

Meanwhile, Yuen cites the Zeemote controller, which has been shown off at Mobile Games Forum, and camera-based interfaces as potential solutions.