According to Ilkka Raiskinen, senior vice president entertainment and media at Nokia Mobile Phones, Nokia has shipped, in the 2 weeks following its launch, 400,000 N-Gage units. Shipped doesn't always mean sold but Mr. Raiskinen was quick to add that they have received follow-up orders from a lot of retailers.
The figure announced does seem very high considering the dismal launch in the U.S. and the reported poor sales in Europe, with gaming retailers, in the U.K., selling only 500 units during launch week. Even so the figure of 400,000 units sold, globally, in 2 weeks is not really impressive. Nokia plan to sell 6 to 9 million units before the end of 2004 and if current trends continue these figures will remain targets for a long while.
One positive piece of information however, was revealed with most N-Gage owners being male and around the ages of 20 and 30 years. This does indicate that Nokia are indeed finding a niche in the market which is not occupied by Nintendo's GBA, whose owners tend to be teenagers.
Although the news about the N-Gage has hardly been satisfactory, when considering Nokia as a company you have to allow them room for the Nintendo factor. Everyone claims that a company with Nintendo's experience cannot let the GameCube sink and that they will find the right moves at the right time in order to save it. The same is very much the case for Nokia. Their experience in the mobile phone market and their strength as a company guarantees support for their product and the ability to persist in order to see it become successful.
It is characteristic of Nokia's strength as a company that during a speech by EA's U.K. M.D. to his employees, he mentioned that EA will stand by Nokia, fully supporting them with titles while he also mentioned that Nokia are just experimenting with N-Gage. His thinking was that since the mobile phone life-cycle is just a year long, Nokia intend to receive as much feedback as possible about N-Gage so that when N-Gage 2 comes along it is a more complete product. EA's Managing Director also mentioned that it is a mistake to compare N-Gage to other consoles since they have a much longer life-cycle and updates to the product are very costly and innefficient. For those of you that may be interested, EA's U.K. M.D. went through a whole gaming speech without mentioning XBox even once. Apparently no-one that works for EA's upper management even knows what that is, a box containing pirate treasure maybe? Just to help EA out please post your comments on what you think XBox is.