Nokia dials into mobile gaming vision

Nokia has showcased its new Snap Mobile games platform at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, along with live demos of N-Gage First Access.

Snap Mobile is a mobile Java gaming platform that covers middleware, hosting, maintenance and online community management.

Nokia announced that it will bring connected mobile Java games to the Snap Mobile platform in partnership with casual game developers PopCap Games.

"Snap Mobile is all about bringing fun multiplayer Java games to the masses, " said Paul Whitaker, head of business development for Snap Mobile at Nokia.

Chuzzle will be the first game to be redeveloped by PopCap under a multi-game agreement with Nokia. A multiplayer version will include community features such as chat and leader boards.

"Downloads of our mobile games continue to grow rapidly and consumers are increasingly looking for on-the-go games that allow them to interact with one another," said Andrew Stein, director of mobile business development at PopCap.

"We are happy to cooperate with a company like Nokia that shares our vision of bringing engaging and fun casual games to the mobile mass-market along with a proven track record of efficiently distributing and hosting connected mobile games."