EA Mobile and Gameloft support Nokia N8 with 12 launch games

Nokia N8 is the hot new device from the world's biggest phone manufacturer, so the big game publishers are keen to get in quick to the new market opportunity.

At Nokia World 2010, the wider duality of the mobile gaming ecosystem was reflected with content provided from EA Mobile and Gameloft.

Both have spent plenty of time getting their development teams up and running and are supporting the launch with a number of titles. The consensus was that it took them four to six months to get to grips with the C++ platform.

Gameloft will have seven games available - Asphalt 5, Real Golf 2011, Avatar, Real Football 2010, GT Racing: Motor Academy, Hero of Sparta and Guitar Rock 2.

EA Mobile is offering four games: Need for Speed: Shift, The Sims 3, Tetris and Monopoly.

Significantly though, with the N8 being the lead device of the Symbian^3 platform, it's the phone that these titles have been optimised for. But, the N8 seems to have its own quirks, most notably we’ve been told it doesn’t support PowerVR compressed textures.

Also, as a device running an ARM 11 680MHz processor with unspecified 3D silicon - similar to Apple's iPhone 3GS, but not ranking as a 1GHz device such as iPhone 4 or Samsung's Wave - it has enough grunt to be able to handle reasonably high end 3D graphics.

Yet, because Nokia's other announced Symbian^3 smartphones, the C7 and especially the C6 are lower speced, the same games won't work for them without being individually optimised. This places something of a spanner in the headlines that Nokia predicts it will sell more than 50 million Symbian^3 devices as publishers are now unsure exactly what the breakdown between devices will be.

EA reckons that The Sims 3, Tetris and Monopoly will work across all launch Symbian^3 phones, so the platform will certainly be viable for less complex graphical titles.

Still, quite how the longevity of OS will play out in the long term as Nokia starts to talk more about its next generation MeeGo devices - the first one due for release in late 2010, early 2011 - remains to be seen.