The death of a system is usually taken hard by many (I'm looking at you Dreamcast fans), but I don't think very many people will be mourning for the loss of their N-Gage. Nokia's semi-failed gaming platform never got off the ground here in the US (or abroad really) in the face of Nintendo's systems and competition from Sony's PSP and Apple's iPhone did nothing to help. It's release in 2003 was met with lukewarm sales that paled in comparison to the Gameboy Advance. Second to it's gaming ability, it was also a cellphone, which attributed to it's $300 price tag.

The system, looking back on it, could theoretically be tagged as a failure to begin with. The system launched with a hefty price tag of $300 and while it had state of the art features at the time for a cell phone (Bluetooth, MP3 player, video player, other PDA features such as a web browser and calendar), the system didn't have as many games as the GBA did nor did it have as low of a price. Even though it was rare for a cell phone to have robust games with fairly good graphics at the time (Call of Duty, Splinter Cell, Tomb Raider, and Red Faction were just some of the 50 games the system had over its lifetime) not many people were using their cell phone for games at the time.

The cell phone was a tri-band GSM, meaning that neither users of Sprint or Verizon could use the phone on their services. Another setback was the fact that it did not support any Japanese carrier at the time. While it didn't have any major competition from a cell-phone/gaming device realm, it did have competition from both gaming devices as well as cell phone devices. Nintendo released the DS system a year after the N-Gage's launch and Sony's PSP soon followed. Both systems crushed any hopes that Nokia had for it's gaming platform even after releasing a 2nd model called the QD.

While it's N-Gage platform won't officially die until September of 2010, games are no longer being developed for the system and it's mobile service is being merged into the Ovi-store, which already has games for many of Nokia's other devices. The announcement was made on their blog and can be found here: http://blog.n-gage.com/archive/mobile-gaming-evolves-–-ovi-store-is-here/