N-Gage Hacked

Nokia’s attempt at grabbing a bit of the portable gaming market from Nintendo was met with less than enthusiastic overtures. In fact, since it’s release it’s sales have little more than trickled in. Complaints about the unit stem from a lack of support (do we really need another Tomb Raider?) to the fact that it’s just too big to be a good cell phone.

Hacker’s helped to lessen their profits by hitting their profitable weak spot, the games. There’s little profit to be had in cellular service and even less, it seems, in the video game hardware market. Games are where companies make their ends meet. According to Yahoo News, a release by Nokia claims that hackers have found a way to crack the software units and allow them to not only be downloaded from the internet but used on any phone with the base Series 60 phone operating system, used on dozens of other cell phones.

Nokia’s N-Gage representative was not overly concerned however, stating that the average consumer would not understand how to acquire the software quoting the need for specialized software and specialized skills. I hate to break this to you Nokia, but your only customers right now are hard core gamers that insist on having the latest and greatest gaming equipment. I’m thinking there’s a STRONG chance that they posess these ‘specialized software’ [cough*KAZAA*cough] and ‘specialized skills’ [cough*HIGHSCHOOLEDUCATIN*cough].