There's a lot of buzz about the global launch of Nokia's mobile game service, N-Gage, wherein Nseries users can buy and play made-for-mobile games straight from their mobile phones. Sure, it's a cool idea backed with so much hype since it's from Nokia.

M:Metrics senior analyst Mark Donovan pointed out that Nokia has a lot of catching up to do in the mobile gaming market.

"Nokia is currently underperforming in the games market today primarily due to the fact that the US market is flooded with low-end, free Nokia phones that came with carrier contracts. Today, N-Series devices are still quite expensive and are not widely distributed in carrier channels, resulting in low market adoption. However, among those toting high-end Nokia devices on the Symbian operating system, 30.8 percent played a mobile game, indicating that mobile gaming is a popular activity on these phones."

Based on the data gathered by M:Metrics as of February 2008, more than 48.4 million people played a mobile game. For Nokia owners, February, 20.1 percent (5.9 million people) played a mobile game, against a market average of 21.4 percent.