Nokia’s inability to compete confirmed.

As I predicted back when it was first announced, Nokia has stopped production of the N-Gage in the U.S. market thanks to horrid sales. As others have reported, the N-Gage was plagued with annoying design flaws, and Nokia’s response was simply to plug another unit, the N-Gage QD. After a failure to turn things around, Nokia decided to throw in the towel and get out of the mobile phone gaming market for now, instead choosing to focus on other mobile entertainment like music.

How someone at Nokia managed to sell the concept of the N-Gage in the first place is what fascinates me, considering Nokia had to go toe-to-toe with Nintendo’s offerings. Then, the fact that retailers like Electronics Boutique bought into the fiasco establishes that a lack of common sense is rampant in the corporate world.

Suffice to say, for those who haven’t learned a lesson from all this, or for those of you who missed it the first time around, I shall be succint in this: People do not want to consolidate all their gadgets if that consolidation means they lose the features of the individual gadgets. For example, why would a gamer want to give up their library of Gameboy games just for the sake of carrying around one unit rather than their Gameboy and their mobile phone? Quite simply, they do not.

This phenomenon will likely hit the mobile music market as well, as Nokia and others try to pitch the mp3-player-on-a-phone concept. Even the fancy new iPod phone, which is less of an iPod than expected, won’t hold out. Once Apple sells an actual iPod with phone capabilities, we may have more to talk about, but in the meantime, keep your consolidation ideas to yourself until you have something else to offer consumeres.

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