February 5 - 4:15pm EST   After considerable delay, Nokia has finally begun an initial rollout of its N-Gage gaming service. The online network allows people to download and play a variety of high-end cellphone games, rendered with both 2D and 3D graphics. The client software is now available through the company's First Access program; although it is only officially said to work with the N81, third-party sources have already managed to remove the software's protective "wrapper," and run N-Gage on phones like the N95. The service was initially slated to launch in November, but the date was then moved to late December, and finally to sometime after the holidays. [full story]

January 28 - 8:55am EST   Nokia on Monday announced a potentially significant move to acquire Trolltech, a Norway-based software developer. The approximately $153 million deal gives Nokia access to Trolltech's Qt and Qtopia open-source software framework and should let the cellphone maker expand its services to work across multiple platforms; through the same architecture used by cross-OS software such as the Opera browser and Skype, services offered through the Ovi portal should work not just across Symbian series 40 and 60 handheld devices from Nokia but also computers running Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, the purchasing company says. [full story]