When Nokia confirmed it wouldn’t be making any more N-Gage models a little while ago, the surprise was, well, surprising, given it had announced the plans at E3 in May to make the N-Gage a gaming platform and extend it across multiple devices, and reiterated it a couple months ago in Barcelona. But then again, blogs can have awfully short memories. In any case, Nokia’s shared some more details of the plan with developers, and it still sounds to be the right idea.

It’s been pretty clear for a long time that having a single games device when there were plenty of other handsets capable of running the games wasn’t the best idea. Too much of the plan’s success hung on the success of the N-Gage, and when it didn’t sell, the whole strategy tanked.

The idea now is yes, you can play these great games on any of these devices — but maybe it would be better on a dedicated device, if that’s what you want, or with a special gaming accessory. That sort of open, additive strategy is far better than one that says, no, you can’t play that game — it doesn’t matter that you’ve got hardware technically capable of running it, it’s just not the “game phone”.

The N-Gage and its games were but one example of these sorts of closed strategies that run rampant in mobile. Far too many products and services are available to a limited number of users, whether it’s for technical, financial or other reasons. Part of the promise of mobility is the huge number of mobile users in the world — but when your product’s available to only a very tiny subset of them, you’re putting limits on your success. (It strikes me as I write this that ShoZu, which I posted about a few minutes ago is an example of this. Cognima Snap is a great product, but it’s only sold to carriers — but ShoZu’s an analog that’s open to anybody. Well, anybody with a compatible handset. But nobody’s perfect :D)

(Image from sidetalkin.com)