Phone/game combo fails to engage an audience

Launched amid fanfare in 2003, Nokia's N-Gage melded a mobile phone with a handheld game machine. Last month, the company quietly admitted it had sold only a third of the 6 million units it expected to ship over three years and announced it would cease development. What went wrong? Although the logic of combining two popular devices seemed sound, the company managed to produce a whole that users perceived as considerably less than the sum of its parts.

In addition to a dearth of compelling games and a high price, two design quirks doomed the machine. First, the user had to open the battery compartment to insert a new game card—an astonishing inconvenience. Second, in an apparent attempt to keep the display free of smears from the user's cheek, Nokia positioned the phone microphone and speaker along one edge of the housing, thus forcing the user to hold the device perpendicular to the face when talking. Incredulous consumers immortalized their disdain in a sarcastic Web site (check out the photo galleries at www.sidetalkin.com), and not even a subsequent redesign that alleviated the "taco-talking" position could help N-Gage recover any cachet.