It is October 2003, and Nokia has decided to declare war on Nintendo. If you’ve stepped into a Carphone Warehouse lately, you’ve likely seen the N-Gage taking pride of place in a plastic display case, looking less like a mobile phone and more like a high-tech Cornish pasty. For the princely sum of £250, Nokia is promising to merge your mobile life with your gaming life, effectively trying to kill off the Game Boy Advance. It is an audacious, arguably insane bit of engineering that is currently the talk of every school playground and IT department in Britain. It’s a ‘taco’ phone, a ‘sideways talker,’ and a genuine Symbian powerhouse all wrapped in a grey-and-silver plastic chassis that feels like it was designed by a committee who had heard of video games but had never actually seen someone play one.nnLet’s address the elephant in the room: the ‘side-talking.’ Because the speaker and microphone are located on the top edge of the device rather than the face, you have to hold the N-Gage perpendicular to your head to make a call. You look like you’re trying to eat a piece of electronics or, as the press has uncharitably dubbed it, ‘sidetalking.’ It’s a baffling design choice that instantly marks you as a tech-experiment gone wrong. However, once you stop worrying about your dignity, the technical specs are actually quite impressive. Under the hood, it’s running Symbian OS 6.1 (Series 60), powered by a 104 MHz ARM9 processor. The screen is a 2.1-inch TFT display with 4,096 colours. While the resolution is the standard 176 x 208, the orientation is vertical—which is a bizarre choice for a gaming machine. Most games feel a bit cramped, as if you’re playing a console through a letterbox turned on its side.nnTechnically, the N-Gage is a multimedia beast. It features a full MP3 player and an FM radio, both of which sound fantastic through the included stereo headset. It’s one of the first phones to really nail high-fidelity audio, and the fact that it uses MMC cards for storage means you can actually carry a decent music library with you. But the gaming is the main event. Games like *Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater* and *Tomb Raider* are ported with surprising accuracy. The N-Gage features a dedicated 3D graphics engine that leaves the Game Boy Advance in the dust in terms of raw polygons. However, the ‘hot-swapping’ of games is a disaster. To change a game, you have to turn the phone off, remove the back cover, and take out the battery. It’s a process so tedious it makes you wonder if Nokia wants you to just buy one phone for every game you own. nnThe connectivity is where the N-Gage actually shines as a pioneer. It features Bluetooth, which allows for wireless multiplayer gaming. Playing *Sega Rally* against a mate in the same room without a link-cable feels like pure sorcery. It’s also got GPRS for N-Gage Arena, a mobile online community that is years ahead of its time. The battery is a 850 mAh Li-Ion pack, which is surprisingly resilient considering the amount of work it’s doing, though a heavy gaming session will still see you reaching for the charger before Coronation Street starts. The N-Gage is a magnificent, flawed, over-engineered experiment. It’s a smartphone that thinks it’s a console, a console that thinks it’s a phone, and a device that ensures you’ll never be bored—provided you don’t mind looking like you’re talking into a plastic sandwich.