The things I hate about N-Gage gaming on the Nokia N95

The possibility of playing high-quality games on a Nokia multimedia-computer is just great. With the N-Gage application you can play everywhere -  on the go, in the bus, in the train or if you’re waiting somewhere for something. With a multimedia-computer by your side you won’t get bored. Unfortunately not all the devices which support N-Gage are real gaming-devices. They aren’t designed for N-Gage like the N81, but they support it.

The Nokia N95 is such a candidate which isn’t designed for N-Gage gaming. In this post I’ll compare it to the real “gaming-king” Nokia N81.

Problem 1: The special gaming-keys

The N-Gage application requires two additional keys for proper gaming. In the Nokia N95 the multimedia-keypad is used for this two keys. They are the stop- and the play/pause-key. Unfortunately the N95′s multimedia-keypad is extremely flat and the keys on it have almost no feedback. Thus it is very hard to use them fast in a game.

Since the N81 is a device designed for gaming it has very good gaming-keys. The keys have a very good feedback and they aren’t too small. You can also press them very fast which is important in many games.

Problem 2: The D-pad

Another problem of the N95 is its D-pad and the surrounding keys. The D-pad is very small and the surrounding menu- and multimedia-key are very big. Thus you will hit those two keys very often while navigating through the game with the small D-pad. This is very annoying, because everytime you hit the wrong button the main-menu or the multimedia-menu will pop up and you have to close it and go back to the game via the taskmanager.

The N81 doesn’t have this problem, the D-pad is very big and it is higher than the rest of the N81′s front-cover, so you won’t have problems using it for games.

Verdict

As you can see there are some problems with N-Gage gaming on devices which aren’t specialised on gaming. This problems are very annoying, especially if you hit the wrong key and you enter a menu while playing a game. Of course this problem doesn’t sound too annoying, but it happens very often and so it definitely is annoying.
Have you also experienced problems while playing N-Gage on your device? If so, leave a comment below!

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