After massive delays, Nokia’s N-Gage service is finally up and ready for business, letting smartphone users download games. read the official N-gage blog.
“We are live! The games, the devices, and the community are all here for you to finally get your teeth into. There will be an official announcement on Monday, but for you, the N-Gage faithful we wanted to let you know we’re up and running”
At launch, only owners of the Nokia N81 8GB, N81 SD, N82, N95, and N95 8GB phones will be able to use N-Gage, but more compatible models are coming, says the company.
Nokia also adds that there is huge interest for gaming on cell phones and interest keeps growing.
“We did a survey in England and 90 percent wanted to play games, but very few had actually bought a game for their phone,” said Christophe Joyau, responsible for services at Nokia in Scandinavia. Joyau notes that mobile gaming has been a failure so far because “there is nowhere to try games, gaming experiences have been poor, and the games are difficult to use.” Nokia hopes N-Gage will solve all these problems.
Despite a failed try at the service back in 2003, Nokia hopes to come back with a vengeance, a hearty lineup of games, and a bigger selection of compatible phones.
Result for: scandinavia
Italy, France, Germany and Scandinavia have begun offering DVD movies on a new format called DVD-D which is unique because it is self-erasing.
By self erasing I mean that the content on the discs are erased exactly 8 hours after the movie is first played in any DVD player or PC drive. The timer is slightly longer for DVD-Ds that have software on them, 48 hours to be exact. The new format is available at kiosks, bookstores and gas stations for about 1/3 the price of standard retail DVDs and seem to be growing in popularity.
After the time is up, inserting the disc into a player will give you a “No Disc” error message. More interestingly, there are recordable DVD-D discs available which can be recorded at up to 8x speed and DVD-5 capacity. After ordering the blanks, the client can then “specify how long the data is to remain, having the option of one-time viewing only, or a time period of 8 hours, 48 hours or otherwise.”
It is important to note that it is unknown right now what copy protection is used on the DVD-D discs, if any or what copy protection potential clients can use to stop experienced users from copying the data to their computers. Even more importantly, the discs and packages are fully recyclable.
