But what needs to be recognised – by both hardware manufacturer's and networks – is that the web should be THE platform for delivery. Embedding services on a particular device or for a specific mobile os (as in the N-Gage example above) is expensive, often difficult for the customer to easily access, creates upgrade complexity and doesn't scale well. The way the 'iPhone economy' has exploded this past year is a pointer to how this can be done well. That iPhone customers are spending significantly more time browsing the Internet on their mobiles than other customers has been well reported. This has been without the development of hardware specific services/applications.

There's money to be made from mobilising the Internet well…

The irony is that Nokia's other internet services (Music, Maps and Share) DO allow you to move content from phone to phone, N-Gage is very much the odd one out in this respect.

As we say in the article, why do they allow you to transfer a 10 euro album bought from Nokia Music Store from phone to phone, but not a 10 euro game bought from N-Gage? Surely they should be treated the same way?

The oddest thing is that Nokia's original plans for N-Gage did include an iTunes style games locker which let you buy and store your games on a PC and load phones up like you'd load iPods. N-Gage was meant to be the iPod of gaming. That seems to have been abandoned.

For that reason I don't think the problem lies with the service designers, because the original N-Gage service designs were actually pretty good. The problem seems more likely to be the people higher up who make more general decisions about money and copyright issues, they may have lost touch with how phone internet services are supposed to operate.

But what needs to be recognised – by both hardware manufacturer's and networks – is that the web should be THE platform for delivery. Embedding services on a particular device or for a specific mobile os (as in the N-Gage example above) is expensive, often difficult for the customer to easily access, creates upgrade complexity and doesn't scale well. The way the 'iPhone economy' has exploded this past year is a pointer to how this can be done well. That iPhone customers are spending significantly more time browsing the Internet on their mobiles than other customers has been well reported. This has been without the development of hardware specific services/applications.

There's money to be made from mobilising the Internet well…

But what needs to be recognised – by both hardware manufacturer's and networks – is that the web should be THE platform for delivery. Embedding services on a particular device or for a specific mobile os (as in the N-Gage example above) is expensive, often difficult for the customer to easily access, creates upgrade complexity and doesn't scale well. The way the 'iPhone economy' has exploded this past year is a pointer to how this can be done well. That iPhone customers are spending significantly more time browsing the Internet on their mobiles than other customers has been well reported. This has been without the development of hardware specific services/applications.

There's money to be made from mobilising the Internet well…

The irony is that Nokia's other internet services (Music, Maps and Share) DO allow you to move content from phone to phone, N-Gage is very much the odd one out in this respect.

As we say in the article, why do they allow you to transfer a 10 euro album bought from Nokia Music Store from phone to phone, but not a 10 euro game bought from N-Gage? Surely they should be treated the same way?

The oddest thing is that Nokia's original plans for N-Gage did include an iTunes style games locker which let you buy and store your games on a PC and load phones up like you'd load iPods. N-Gage was meant to be the iPod of gaming. That seems to have been abandoned.

For that reason I don't think the problem lies with the service designers, because the original N-Gage service designs were actually pretty good. The problem seems more likely to be the people higher up who make more general decisions about money and copyright issues, they may have lost touch with how phone internet services are supposed to operate.