Abstract
This article examines sidetalking – a usability feature introduced by Nokia in its N-Gage and 7700 devices during 2002 and 2003 – and positioned as innovative; sidetalking involved holding the phone sideways during calls. This reflected Nokia's attempt to cater to an imagined youth demographic defined by playfulness and individuality. However, the feature was widely mocked, becoming a cultural meme and contributing to the commercial failure of the N-Gage. Using the concepts of designed identity and domestication, the article argues that sidetalking's failure was less about technological limitations and more about cultural misalignment. Nokia's inability to communicate the rationale behind sidetalking left it vulnerable to consumer reinterpretation through domestication. This analysis highlights the dynamic interplay between design, user reception, and the framing of innovation in how technology is contextualized.
This article examines sidetalking, a short-lived mobile phone design feature implemented in Nokia's N-Gage and 7700 devices in the early 2000s. The term refers to the sideways orientation required for making a call, which involves holding the phone's edge against the ear. The N-Gage, released in October 2003, was Nokia's attempt to enter the handheld gaming market, while the Nokia 7700 was a multimedia phone developed concurrently with the N-Gage (see Figure 1). It was the first serious attempt by Nokia to introduce a product with a touch screen. The device supported various multimedia formats and was introduced to the public as a media device rather than a phone (Lettice, 2003).
N-Gage and Nokia 7700.
Sales for the N-Gage did not meet expectations. Nokia's upper management admitted that the N-Gage was a commercial failure a year after its release. It gave it time, until November 2005, to meet sales expectations (Fahey, 2004). These were not realized, and Nokia discontinued the device in early 2006. In total, Nokia shipped an estimated 1 to 3 million N-Gage units. The Nokia 7700 was almost ready for launch when it was canceled in 2004. At this point, prototype units had been distributed to the press, which, in some cases, noted the peculiar sidetalking design.
The market failure of the N-Gage is usually attributed to two reasons. First, the N-Gage struggled to challenge the dominance of the Nintendo Game Boy in the handheld video game market (Heinonen, 2017, p. 67). Second, the N-Gage's usability as a gaming device was widely critiqued. A key issue impacting the usability of games was that switching between games was more difficult than on competitors’ devices. Users had to switch the power off and remove the battery to change games, as the memory card slot was located below the battery. This feature was a deal breaker for many potential customers accustomed to the ease of operation of Nintendo devices (Ahonen, 2003; GMR, 2003; Howson, 2003). Apart from the usability, other contributing factors to the commercial failure of the device were its high price, the ambiguous product concept of N-Gage within Nokia, lack of original game content, the marketing of the device, and its focus on hardcore gaming instead of casual gaming (Ollila & Saukkomaa, 2016; Sotamaa et al., 2022).
Sidetalking was widely ridiculed and often cited as a contributor to the devices’ commercial failure. In this article, sidetalking provides a valuable lens for understanding how design, identity, and cultural reception intersect in the history of mobile media. Rather than focusing on its technical viability, this article investigates its design history and cultural framing, demonstrating that sidetalking was a deliberate design choice shaped by Nokia's changing strategy during the early 2000s as it reconceptualized its business from phone manufacturing to “convergent” multimedia. Nokia had dominated the global mobile phone business for some time, but the growth potential in phones was considered limited. The company recognized the importance of data transfer for the future of cell phones around the mid-1990s while searching for new ventures that could supplement its narrow core business. The company called the process in which mobile phones would turn gradually into pocket computers “convergence” (Dos & Wilson, 2018). The growing importance of convergence for the company's strategy culminated in the fall of 2003, when Nokia published a new organizational model that reflected the company's willingness to explore new markets. Nokia's Multimedia unit was launched to create new business opportunities in the areas of games, music, and cameras (Karvala, 2004). Both the N-Gage and Nokia 7700 were seen inside Nokia as being among the key products in the commercialization of convergence. Sidetalking was a feature deliberately crafted to appeal to a youth market that was playful and nonconforming, and wanted tech-savvy aesthetics – a youth market that Nokia considered the key audience for their experimental multimedia phones.
This article draws on three interconnected theoretical frameworks – design identity, actor–network theory, and domestication theory – to analyze the emergence, reception, and reframing of Nokia's sidetalking feature. These frameworks situate sidetalking as a cultural artifact shaped by internal organizational dynamics and public meaning-making over time. Together, these frameworks allow us to analyze sidetalking as a sociotechnical script, a designed identity artifact, and a cultural object whose meaning shifted through public reinterpretation. By tracing the emergence, response, and retrospective reevaluation of sidetalking, we demonstrate how mobile technologies are not merely designed or consumed but constantly contested and reevaluated across time and context.
The groundwork for this article was laid during the collection of source material for the museum exhibition “A Fantastic Failure,” which was displayed in The Finnish Museum of Games between October 2023 and December 2024. 1 The exhibition discussed the development, marketing, reception, and legacy of N-Gage, and was based on research on documentary sources as well as interviews with people who had worked on N-Gage or its games. The documentary material collected for the exhibition consisted of artifacts and documents produced by industrial designers working for Nokia and the marketing material for the final products. We will use these as our primary sources for this article. In addition, we will use a collection of writings published between 2003 and 2021 to map the differences (and similarities) in how sidetalking has been addressed in popular media.
In the following article, we consider sidetalking through the design documentation and marketing material produced by Nokia, the media response to sidetalking during the promotion and release of the Nokia N-Gage, and various subsequent reevaluations of the phenomenon. First, through the lens of script analysis (Akrich, 1992), we demonstrate how sidetalking resulted from contested scripts within Nokia's sociotechnical network, that balanced engineering, branding, and market strategy. Second, the article examines how the failure of sidetalking was narrated, negotiated, and partially redeemed by the media. In the final section, we examine how the “failure” or “success” of sidetalking is culturally and temporally contingent, shaped by shifting discourses of value, usability, and design.
Scripting cool: sidetalking and designed identity
We turn to actor–network theory (ANT) to examine how sidetalking emerged from Nokia's internal design processes. In ANT, technologies are not passive tools but sociotechnical artifacts shaped through negotiations among heterogeneous actors: engineers, designers, marketers, corporate imaginaries, and anticipated users. A central concept of this analysis is the notion of a script (Akrich, 1992, p. 208): a projected model of use inscribed into the material form of an artifact. Scripts define how technology imagines its user, shaping roles, behaviors, competencies, and even the social contexts in which it is meant to operate. We argue that sidetalking was a script embedded in hardware that encouraged users to enact distinction, coolness, and nonconformity.
During the period when sidetalking was introduced, mobile phones underwent rapid changes in appearance, use, and technology. The 90s saw the commodification of the mobile phone and the negotiation of “how” the novel communication technology should be used. During the decade, an innovation introduced in mobile phones – the text message – was widely incorporated into mobile communication (Kopomaa, 2000; Sørensen, 2006, pp. 51–55). This feature did not go unnoticed at Nokia. In 2001, it released the Nokia 5510, a phone targeted explicitly toward youth, whom the company saw as the most enthusiastic users of text messages. The phone incorporated a miniature qwerty keyboard, and it was mainly meant to be used horizontally (see Figure 2), a significant deviation from the dominant design paradigms of cell phones at the time (Nokia, 2001b). This design shift can be understood as a form of “scripting” (Akrich, 1992), in which the device's material configuration inscribed a projected user identity that was youthful, texting-oriented, and comfortable with non-standard formats.
Nokia 5510.
The rise of text messages was considered a minor evolution compared to the “revolution” that convergence would set in motion. The head of Nokia's Digital Convergence unit, Anssi Vanjoki, described convergence as “fundamental,” as the emerging third-generation radio technology (3G) would enable “a spontaneous way of life for everyone living in developed societies” (Yle, 2000). 3G was one of the key components in the realization of convergence. In the early 2000s, the development and hype of 3G were in full swing. Nokia proclaimed that 2002 would see the breakthrough of 3G and that more people would use the internet with their phones than with their computers during the same year (Dos & Wilson, 2018, pp. 64, 72). Around that time, Nokia published several whitepapers that depicted people watching television broadcasts or taking a video call using mockup devices with large horizontal touch screens. These whitepapers reflect Nokia's early attempts to script convergent mobile use into the very form factor of the device, both anticipating and inscribing assumptions about behavior, media consumption, and everyday routines into the object's design.
“From ears to eyes,” declares the headline of one brochure discussing the evolution of mobile multimedia. This change will blur the line between personal and business life and change our culture (Nokia, 2000). One of the key programs aimed at turning the vision of convergence into a viable commercial product at Nokia was the Nokia 7700 (codenamed MX2). Just as the whitepapers had predicted, the Nokia 7700 was designed mainly for multimedia consumption. Over 100 pages of documents produced by the design department of Nokia for the MX2 have been preserved (see Figure 3). These documents consist mainly of design sketches and blueprints. They contain abundant visual explorations of different forms and functions, as well as user interfaces and control schemes for consuming multimedia. These documents show how designers attempted to anticipate and encode modes of interaction and cultural use into the material design of the phone, illustrating how expectations about how convergence would drive the use of the device were transformed into specific design scripts. The early design principle of MX2 aimed for modularity: The product range would consist of a core module with a large screen, which users could combine with modules installed on top of and below the screen, thereby enhancing the phone's capabilities with better game controllers, cameras, music features, and more processing power. The physical prototypes of MX2 underwent at least four significant changes in their form function before the final shape of the device was decided (Alfthan, 2002, 2003).
Nokia Design Department's sketch portraying the modular form function for MX2.
It was unclear which user interface scheme or form function would prove itself as a standard for convergence. The MX2 team tried to define this standard. This iterative process led to the final, “odd” taco-like shape of the Nokia 7700. At each step of MX2's development, the shape and user interface of the device were drastically different from the dominant design principles used by Nokia at the time. This further illustrates the designers’ attempts to proactively explore and define novel ways of experiencing the new mobile multimedia rather than reactively adapting to changing ways of using cell phones. This exploratory design process reflects what Akrich (1992) describes as the inscription of a “script,” a projected model of user behavior embedded in the object itself. The sideways grip required by sidetalking was a material instantiation of Nokia's internal vision of how young people would hold and use the device, and how the device would be perceived by others. Designers acted on the ambition that it would appeal to the quirky, forward-looking, and performative designed identity it had constructed.
Despite the many iterations the MX2 concept underwent during its development, certain design principles persisted in the final product. The most defining features of MX2 throughout its development were the (stylus-operated) touch screen and the principle that the product would be mainly used horizontally in front of the user's eyes. The primacy of earphones over the phone's built-in speaker was also introduced early in the phone's development (Alfthan, 2002). These design principles offer affordances for more advanced mobile multimedia consumption. At the same time, they are closely connected to sidetalking. These priorities emerged from a broader organizational ambition to culturally redefine mobile interaction, fitting within what ANT would frame as a negotiation among devices, designers, and imagined audiences (Latour, 2005).
The primacy of earphones is paramount. In a device aimed at multimedia consumption, the designers emphasized the importance of sound quality, and earphones offer better sound quality than the device's built-in speaker. The designers of MX2 believed that people would use earphones continuously with their phones and take phone calls with them as well (see Figure 4). This belief was scripted into the device, anticipating a headphone-wearing user imagined as a multimedia user invested in high-quality audio. Consequently, the primacy of earphones was used as an argument justifying sidetalking inside Nokia, as well as for the journalists (Morris 2003). Similarly, some engineers who worked with N-Gage have stated that sidetalking was justified by the argument that youth would use phones mainly by sending text messages and rarely take calls (Jungman, 2024).
A concept drawing of MX2 shows the main usage mode and user as perceived by the phone's designer. With the permission of Aalto University Archive / Nokia Design Archive.
As an element of the MX2 project, sidetalking was among the active attempts to define new conventions for convergent digital technologies. One of the earliest MX2 concepts describes the product as including the basic phone features and the trademarked “Sidetalking®” solution (Alfthan, 2002), demonstrating that it was a planned feature incorporated in the early design phases and that the term “sidetalking” was coined by Nokia. In this sense, sidetalking was a “script” (Akrich, 1992), a scenario embedded in the artifact that anticipates, constrains, and enacts a particular form of user interaction. This deliberate branding of sidetalking exemplifies what Chess (2017) terms a “designed identity,” a constructed persona imagined by developers to align with commercial and cultural goals. In targeting youth markets, Nokia inscribed values of nonconformity and techno-playfulness into the form itself, materializing a vision of user identity that could be performed through use.
Designed identity elaborates on the ramifications of the assumptions regarding youth identity encoded in this script. Designed identities are idealized user profiles crafted through product design and marketing narratives that often do not reflect actual users but instead conjure demographic fantasies of users as imagined by designers, marketers, and brand strategists (Chess, 2017). While Chess does not frame her concept of designed identity in terms of actor–network theory, it parallels Akrich's (1992) idea of the script. Both describe how designers inscribe expectations about users into technologies: Akrich focuses on the usage patterns and competencies embedded in the material form, while Chess emphasizes the demographic and affective profiles crafted through design and marketing. In this article, we treat designed identity as a cultural variant of scripting, one that encodes both who the user is imagined to be and how they are expected to use the product.
Several engineers who worked with N-Gage have since confirmed that there was no technical reason for sidetalking. According to them, they produced prototypes of the N-Gage that allowed one to talk normally, but their suggestions were rejected, and sidetalking persisted. From an ANT perspective, this moment illustrates a failure in internal translation: While engineers saw the design as impractical and offered alternatives, the actor–network privileged brand distinctiveness and visibility. This reflects a tension in the scripting process (Akrich, 1992), where designers inscribe a vision of use into an artifact that conflicts with other actors’ interests or practical constraints. Thus, the resulting artifact embodies a precarious arrangement of conflicting organizational logic. Timo Suhonen, the first Project Program Manager of the project that produced N-Gage, suggested that sidetalking was conceived so that Nokia could stand out from its competitors (Kuorikoski, 2023, p. 58). Similarly, Akseli Anttila, a former Lead Designer at Nokia, indicated that the design was thought to be a hit among youngsters (Koskinen, 2017). Indeed, N-Gage's primary target customers were youth and young adults aged 18–35 (Nokia, 2003a, 2003b). More broadly, the company viewed youth as a key customer segment in its expansion from phone manufacturing to a multimedia and content business. Its marketing used the umbrella term “techno coolness” to describe the branding that intertwined games, music, and other multimedia (Karvala, 2004; Nokia, 2001b).
Nokia's growing interest in young consumers was concurrent with the growing challenges in its operating field. With the commoditization of mobile phones, competition for market share intensified, and the profits per device declined. To add to this uncertainty, the telecom sector experienced financial stagnation primarily due to the bubble created by overinvestment in 3G licenses (Dos & Wilson, 2018, pp. 77–78). Nokia addressed these challenges by renewing its sales and marketing strategies. The company attempted to transform mobile phones into fashionable lifestyle products (Dos & Wilson, 2018, p. 78; Strategic Directions, 2005). It sought to sell more phones by dividing its potential customer base into smaller, more targeted segments. It then built specialized features into the products it marketed to these subsegments. Like most mobile phone manufacturers at the time, Nokia believed that divergent design in phones would boost their sales by appealing to the tastes of their target groups. As Akrich (1992, p. 208) notes, designers script expected users into the configuration of technological artifacts; in Nokia's case, the distinct design of the N-Gage became a carrier of stylized, segmented identities. In terms of designed identity, Nokia actively constructed a stylized youth persona marked by nonconformity and playfulness.
The designers at Nokia believed that the youth market desired products that deviated from the mainstream norms. A paper produced at Nokia's design department around the year 2000, described as an exploration of a possible direction for youth market products, defines “individuality” as one of the core characteristics of young consumers (Burns, n.d.). The paper encapsulates the importance of individuality for youth with the following claim: “I don’t want to be the same as everyone else. Paradoxically, I must also be fashionable now” (Burns, n.d., p. 2). This articulation exemplifies how designed identities are constructed through design and marketing to guide consumption and how, in turn, they shape the vision of the user that is scripted into new technologies (Chess, 2017, pp. 5–6).
These considerations were realized in the Nokia 5510. With its unconventional form, the phone was marketed mainly to youngsters with the slogan “Looks weird. Sounds great” (Nokia, 2001a). Nokia's sales guide described the product as “enable[ing] users to express their individuality” with a target customer that is excited “by the novelty of new, cool gadgets” (Nokia, 2001b, p. 4). The Nokia 5510's branding and industrial sales guide scripted a designed identity rooted in novelty, nonconformity, and distinction. The material form and marketing of the 5510 offered a stylized vision of how young users act and self-present, reflecting how designed objects contain “visions of (or presumptions about) the world” (Akrich, 1992, p. 208). The goal of the Nokia 5510's successor (codenamed Starship) changed from a media phone to a gaming phone after 1 year of product development (Jungman, 2024), and the notion that the target demographic was scripted as early adopters, as well as cultural outliers drawn to weirdness as a sign of subcultural capital, carried over to what eventually became the N-Gage. In this context, sidetalking can be read as a material expression of a behavioral script embedded in hardware that prompts users to perform “coolness” through public deviance from normative use.
Nokia's designers and marketers had created a highly idealized archetype of the group they were trying to design for and market their products to. For example, the design department's paper exploring youth market products defines the youth's identity – a highly diverse range of people – with five core characteristics condensed into five keywords. These are further elucidated with a few short claims written with the first-person pronoun, giving the impression that they are quotes from the imagined youth (Burns, n.d.). After defining this simple framework for the youth mindset, the paper proposes design philosophies that should be followed when making a product for this imagined identity. As a method of constructing the archetypal youth consumer, the paper mentions that its ideas “have been developed from observation of media, people, retail and social environments” (Burns, n.d., p. 3). A similar archetypal condensation of the imagined identity of young consumers can be discerned from the sales guides of the Nokia 5510 and N-Gage (Nokia, 2003a).
By examining the evidence and background, we conclude that sidetalking was a deliberately executed design choice. It is closely intertwined with attempts to innovate and define novel modes of phone usage. At the same time, it attempts to appeal to young people as a consumer group and serves as a good example of an organization's (failed) use of designed identity. These conclusions contrast with many popular accounts that frame sidetalking as an attempt to solve a technical problem. Instead, sidetalking can be considered a script or set of embedded assumptions about the user. The sideways grip scripted a style of comportment that deviated from convention: positioning the user to hold it in a distinctive manner, performatively displaying their “cool” youth identity in public. The sidetalking devices prioritized screen-oriented consumption over conversation, reflecting Nokia's strategic pivot toward multimedia convergence. Culturally, the script presumed that youth users would embrace sidetalking as a marker of individuality, quirkiness, and techno-cool – values consistently associated with the youth demographic in Nokia's internal documents and marketing campaigns. As Akrich (1992, p. 208) notes, such scripts are anticipatory: They are “projected users” that designers build into the object, expecting that real users will adopt the behaviors and attitudes envisioned for them.
From bewilderment to ridicule: domesticating sidetalking
Domestication refers to the process by which technologies are integrated into everyday life, a process that domestication theorists map as having four “dimensions”: appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion (Hynes & Rommes, 2006, p. 127). Domestication is not always seamless or affirmative, as users frequently turn technologies to ends of their own making (Ang, 1996), and these technologies may be repurposed and take on different meanings over time (Berker et al., 2006). In this section, we use domestication to interpret both the initial response to sidetalking from technology journalists after the release of the N-Gage and the more recent reframing of sidetalking as an ambitious design feature misaligned with its historical moment.
Sidetalking has been addressed in the media since Nokia first demoed N-Gage for the public in February 2002. It is mentioned in most media coverage of the N-Gage but less so in texts that deal with the Nokia 7700. Only a small portion of texts explain the design; most of these explanations frame sidetalking as a technological compromise or an attempt to create a new design that better fits some technical aspects of cell phones or game devices.
Explaining a design choice is not strictly in the scope of product reviews. However, the lack of such explanations for sidetalking in the N-Gage reviews is partly due to Nokia's sporadic official communication about sidetalking. None of the 22 official press releases dealing with N-Gage before the device's release mentions sidetalking, even though it was a planned designed feature. It is referenced for the first and only time in the press release of the N-Gage QD – successor to N-Gage – in which Anssi Vanjoki is quoted about improvements made into the device: “For phone calls, we reoriented the speaker and microphone to support ‘classic talking’” (Nokia, 2004, april 14). The Nokia sales guide, which was distributed to the wholesalers of Nokia products, contains a 12-page section about N-Gage but is also without any mention of sidetalking or its intent (Nokia, 2003a). Sidetalking lacked a concrete, unified message that could be rationalized for the potential consumer, and this lack of clarity created a palpable sense of bewilderment among the tech journalists tasked with introducing the device to consumers.
Nokia demonstrated the design solution for their partners in press events and technology fairs before N-Gage's launch. Heikki Aura, who worked with developing N-Gage’s business strategy, described the challenge of demoing sidetalking by an anecdote of how the device was received in the game publisher Atari's main office. He recalled that pitching was awkward because he knew that it would be necessary to explain that the user was supposed to talk to it sideways at some point. He recalled that Atari was adamant that the feature was a dealbreaker. Aura thought they were right, even though he did his best to convince them that the feature would be popular (Jungman, 2024). A few written accounts reverberate how N-Gage's design was introduced to journalists. In their article about one of N-Gage’s pre-launch press events, Finnish game magazine Pelaaja reported that Nokia described their approach with N-Gage as “something different.” The magazine described the marketing of N-Gage as presenting the device as trendy and stylish but added that they are unconvinced (Kauppinen, 2003). Another Finnish game magazine, Pelit, reported from the global unveiling event of N-Gage that even the Nokia PR corps was unsure which side of the device they were supposed to talk to (Lindén, 2003). These examples demonstrate the looseness of the marketing message, particularly in sidetalking, and how it failed to reassure its audience. If the original reason behind sidetalking was to convey a feeling of something “cool,” or “quirky,” as our evidence suggests, the N-Gage's marketing failed to convey these sentiments to the press.
Pelit magazine's account of the Nokia press officer's puzzlement over how to discuss the gaming phone was the first to attempt to rationalize the design. It suggested that this hiccup in the marketing event was because N-Gage was, first and foremost, a game device and only secondary, a phone. The magazine thus believed that the device's design, including sidetalking, was a compromise to turn the cellphone into a game device. Another early explanation for sidetalking was that it was a technical compromise. In its analysis of Nokia's leap into the gaming business, the Finnish periodical Apu explained that, when using the N-Gage, the thin side of the device was placed against the user's cheek because the keyboard necessary for gaming pushed the microphone and speaker to the side (Holopainen, 2003). The Finnish media rationalized sidetalking, acting as intermediaries in the processes of appropriating the “bewildering” device. Generally, Finnish gaming magazines treated Nokia's game devices more positively and with more understanding than their counterparts in other countries did (Jungman, 2024, pp. 91–112). A study into Pelit magazine's discourse about the Finnish game industry has shown that the magazine maintained a national pride, which resulted in only mild criticism alongside more positive views of Nokia's game business on its pages (Rannanpiha et al., 2021).
By the turn of the millennium, Nokia had grown into the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world. For a relatively small country like Finland, the influence of a company of this size was significant. In 2003, Nokia accounted for over 3% of Finland's GDP (Ali-Yrkkö, 2010, p. 10). The Finnish state supported Nokia in various ways, including corporate acquisitions, direct R&D funding, standardization, and tailored education. At the same time, Nokia paid significant taxes, employed over 20,000 people in Finland (and more than 100,000 globally), established a large-scale local subcontracting network, and generated considerable international attention that benefited many other regional actors (Lemola, 2020, pp. 169–198).
Nokia's move to enter the game business was discussed in Finnish media. In the mainstream and entertainment media of the country, Nokia's new game device was widely considered a bold move that included considerable risks (Holopainen, 2003; Mäntylä, 2003; Ruohonen, 2003; Yle, 2002). Most of the Finnish writing attempted to maintain readers’ trust in Nokia and tried to see the more questionable parts in Nokia's implementation of its newest venture in a positive or at least hopeful light. This hope for the success of the phone giant is portrayed in Apu's article, which describes the design of N-Gage. The article explains that the screen familiar from Nokia's camera phones is exceptional in gaming, which requires new thinking from game developers (Holopainen, 2003). The local media balanced informing citizens about Nokia's latest activities by offering a rationale for its unusual design decisions. In the case of the N-Gage in Finland, individuals were offered a discourse that implicitly inserted the device into a national-level consciousness, which interacted with the individual-level experiences of use.
Unlike Pelit and Apu, a few of the early critical reviews of the N-Gage framed sidetalking as a design choice. Finnish computer magazine Mikrobitti noted sarcastically, in a caption of a picture displaying sidetalking, that it brought youthful nuance to the N-Gage (Honkonen, 2003). Eurogamer wrote, “We’re not sure which design genius at Nokia decided that people think it's cool to look like you have a Frisbee embedded in your head – but we were soon to learn that it's not the only mistake he made with the basic design of the deck” (Fahey, 2003). Critics outside of Finland felt less responsibility to offer rationales for sidetalking, instead explicitly rejecting the design choice as “faddish” and “uncool,” a sentiment with which Finnish publications like Mikrobitti clearly agreed, but only voiced obliquely. However, the bulk of the writing dealing with N-Gage before its launch or during the official lifetime of the product does not try to explain sidetalking.
In October 2003, the Finnish computer magazine Tietokone published an issue that contained a preview of the Nokia 7700 and a review of the N-Gage. However, it indicated that the writer was perplexed by the devices’ sidetalking functionality. Both articles commented in bafflement that Nokia had located the speaker and microphone peculiarly on the thinner side of the phones (Lehto, 2003a, 2003b). While puzzling, the sidetalking feature also caused considerable amusement; most N-Gage reviewers explicitly found sidetalking ridiculous. For example, journalists described talking on the phone as resembling a taco (Howson, 2003; Morris 2003), a meat pie (Ahonen, 2003), or a Frisbee (Fahey, 2003), and that it made the user look like a one-eared Mickey Mouse (Honkonen, 2003). Initial confusion over the feature gave way to ridicule, suggesting that Nokia's design did not convince key intermediaries that sidetalking would resonate with young, “cool” users.
To depict these descriptions, some journalists published a picture of themselves talking on the N-Gage with a less flattering expression (Honkonen, 2003; Morris 2003). Probably encouraged by these pictures, N-Gage users began posting pictures of themselves talking sideways to the N-Gage in many discussion threads about the device (Rainisto, 2003). Sidetalking quickly turned into a popular meme, in which one person posed with any bulky object sideways against their ear. Sidetalking also has its own “fan” homepage, which people hold against their ear, for example, a banana, a home console, a copy machine, or a girlfriend (sidetalking.com, 2024). This suggests that memetic circulation played a role in the redomestication of sidetalking, as it established the device as distinctive and memorable, although not in the way Nokia had intended. The widespread ridicule of sidetalking in the media has an ambiguous role in the rejection of the N-Gage, as it is also the feature for which it is remembered.
Domestication is typically understood as the process by which technologies are accepted and integrated into everyday routines (Silverstone & Hirsch, 1992). However, in this case, media ridicule and meme culture can also be seen as part of the domestication process. As Strathern (1992, p. viii) notes, “people are more free than the technologies suggest—that they resist colonization—and turn these devices to creative ends, and to ends of their own making.” In this sense, the ludic and ironic treatment of sidetalking through memes is a mode of consumer creativity that rejected Nokia's over-determinism of “cool.” However, in the process of the rejection of official corporately scripted “cool,” sidetalking became the enduring legacy of the N-Gage in popular culture through the enduring curation and sharing of playful, ironic, and nostalgic performances of using the device.
Fantastic failure: the legacies of sidetalking
Over the years, many writers have commented on the legacy of N-Gage and analyzed the reasons for its failure. Although most of these writings still do not try to explain sidetalking, a few texts seek to explain the rationale behind it. In one such account, published in 2011, technology enthusiast Cody W. Hanson discusses mobile devices as the frontier for information creation and access. Hanson begins his article with a humorous anecdote about his brief relationship with N-Gage eight years prior. He portrays Nokia's gaming phone as an ill-conceived device but a visionary concept of mobile multimedia, which “holds a special place in the hall of fame of misguided, poorly designed gadgets” but which opened his eyes “to what was possible in a mobile device” and which made him feel “pretty sure I was living in the future” (Hanson, 2011, pp. 5–6). The writing frames sidetalking as a compromise arising from a technical reason. According to Hanson, the engineers had to place the phone's speaker and microphone along the top edge to “cram” both the gaming controls and the phone's number pad in the front of the device.
Another technology enthusiast's account about N-Gage was published in the Finnish computer culture magazine Skrolli in 2017. It explained sidetalking similarly: “Fitting all of this technology in a tiny shell meant that Nokia had to compromise on the phone itself. The speaker and microphone were moved to the top edge of the device” (Heinonen, 2017, p. 67). The article concludes that it has “no hard feelings” for N-Gage, explaining: “Mobile gaming now mainly takes place on smartphones – which is exactly what Nokia tried to do 15 years ago. Even contemporary reviews stated that the N-Gage was a good idea that was poorly executed” (Heinonen, 2017, p. 68). These retrospective explanations demonstrate that failure is an interpretation shaped by cultural and historical context (Apperley & Parikka, 2018, pp. 356–359). As Gooday (1998, p. 265) argues, failure is “a matter of imputation according to socially-embedded criteria,” and what appears as misguided design may later be seen as foresightful experimentation.
Sidetalking was important enough to warrant a comment in the memoirs of Nokia's long-lasting chairman and CEO, Jorma Ollila. First published in Finnish as Mahdoton menestys (2013), it is an explanatory and defensive account of the phenomenal early success of Nokia's mobile phone business and what caused its decline. The book suggests that Nokia had become a prisoner of its early successes. The N-Gage is portrayed as a pioneer who helped the Finnish mobile game industry achieve later success. He links the achievements of hit games like Angry Birds and Clash of Clans to N-Gage and Nokia as a whole: It [the N-Gage] wasn‘t a success, but partly through Nokia's support, Finland gained significant expertise in games design. In recent years, Finnish companies such as Rovio and Supercell have again shown how Finland can compete at the top levels. (Ollila & Saukkomaa, 2016, pp. 288–289)
Contrary to this vague technical justification of the design by Ollila and Saukkomaa, it was given a more elaborate explanation by Mobile Phone Museum, a British-based charity and museum affiliated with the telecom industry. After explaining that sidetalking looked “a little ridiculous” (Mobile Phone Museum, 2024), their website explains that sidetalking was an attempt to mitigate the effects of phone radiation and the specific absorption rate (SAR), which relates to the radiofrequency energy absorbed by the body. In the early 2000s, concerns arose about the potential adverse health effects of phone radiation. In contrast, the development of mobile phone technology made the devices thinner and the antenna closer to the user's head. The museum states that sidetalking was conceived by Frank Nuovo, then Nokia's head of design, to reduce SAR measurements by moving the antenna further away from the user's head (Mobile Phone Museum, 2024). This is the most profound technologically framed explanation of the design, but like most popular accounts about sidetalking, it does not provide a source for its claims. This absence of citation reflects the tendency to reduce complex sociotechnical contexts into simplified technical causes (Lipartito, 2003, p. 63). If the origin of sidetalking was founded in a concern about the negative health impacts of antennae radiation, this purpose was not communicated in the subsequent design development, as it is not mentioned in any preserved documentation. This unproven technical reasoning is presented to redeem the device's reputation.
In recent years, a few explanations for sidetalking offer an alternative to these technologically focused reasonings. Microsoft acquired Nokia's mobile phone business in 2013. Soon after, thousands of people who had worked with Nokia mobile phones in Finland were laid off. After Microsoft completely withdrew from the mobile phone market in 2016, these former employees surged into the Finnish public discussion sphere with insider accounts of Nokia and its company culture (Cord, 2014; Lindén, 2016). Among these accounts were a couple of cases that discussed sidetalking. They no longer framed it in terms of technological reasoning but explained it as a pure design choice. In a 2023 book on the history of Finnish mobile games, Timo Suhonen, the first Project Program Manager of the Starship project, states that sidetalking was a pure design choice without any technical necessity. According to Suhonen, the speaker and microphone could have been installed into the phone normally, and sidetalking was a premeditated design solution that would draw attention to the device (Kuorikoski, 2023, p. 58). Suhonen's account mirrors an earlier statement by another old Nokia employee, Lead Designer Akseli Anttila, who mentions sidetalking in the documentary Nokia Mobile: We Were Connecting People (2017). They wanted something iconic, Anttila explains, so if someone is seen using a phone in such a way, it would be immediately recognizable as a Nokia (Koskinen, 2017). Anttila worked in the design department of Nokia (although not directly with N-Gage or Nokia 7700 – a fact omitted in the documentary) during the genesis of sidetalking, and his statement seems to diminish the technological reasons behind the solution. Definitions of success or failure are always “temporally and geographically bounded” (Gooday, 1998, p. 270). Suhonen's and Anttila's statements recast sidetalking as an iconic branding choice that defied convention, shifting away from the narrative of technological compromise that has often characterized contemporary reflections on the device.
In his blog, Product Designer Dan Whelan discusses the origins of sidetalking. Whelan, a videogame hobbyist interested in N-Gage, cites the Nokia Mobile documentary, acknowledging sidetalking as a premeditated design choice. He nevertheless starts his analysis by providing another explanation ultimately framed as a technical compromise and “practical reason worth mentioning” (Whelan, 2021). According to him, Nokia “opted for the sideways method” because making a phone call while gaming could disturb the game if the device pressed against the user's cheek (Whelan, 2021). As in previous cases, which explain the solution as a technical compromise, no source is provided for the claim. If true, this reason for sidetalking soon lost its original meaning: The software running in N-Gage pauses and locks the game when a call is received or made, effectively preventing calls from affecting the game. Again, more interesting than whether this explanation is valid is the fact that it provides yet another reasoning framed as a technical compromise necessary to combine cell phones and game devices. This persistent framing of sidetalking as a practical compromise reflects what Gooday (1998, p. 278) identifies as “failure through compromise,” where multiple priorities lead to partial design trade-offs. However, as Lipartito (2003, p. 76) notes, such closure narratives often conceal the ongoing contingency and interpretive openness of technological outcomes. As these varied accounts show, sidetalking cannot be understood through technical logic alone. The question of failure is discursive, contingent, and historically unstable. Rather than being a final judgment, failure is a flexible site of reinterpretation, speculation, and narrative work (Lipartito, 2003; Nicoll, 2019).
Conclusions
Sidetalking's design history is deeply entangled with Nokia's ambitions to shape emerging mobile media practices amid rapid technological change. Conceived as a deliberately distinctive interface, sidetalking was scripted to appeal to a youth-oriented identity, emphasizing novelty and playfulness. Nokia embedded a stylized persona into the very form of the N-Gage and Nokia 7700, a user who would embrace unconventional design and enact it as a marker of individuality.
Nokia's scripting of sidetalking reflected a broader cultural logic of ludification, characterized by the entanglement of play, identity, and media (Frissen et al., 2015). The gesture was designed to appear quirky, ironic, and performative, appealing to youth imagined as playful early adopters. However, this intended script was swiftly overwritten by tech journalists and everyday users who found it awkward and overdetermined. The sideways-talking pose became an object of ridicule and meme culture, subjecting Nokia's carefully scripted “cool” design identity to user-authored parody. However, this contributed to its enduring memorability and eventual redomestication, which reworked it as a humorous artifact rather than the intended emblem of techno-cool.
From an actor–network theory perspective, this breakdown reflects a failed translation: designers, engineers, marketers, and imagined users were never fully aligned in their visions of the product. What emerged was a fragile sociotechnical artifact shaped by internal tensions. While Nokia inscribed a behavioral script into the hardware, consumers resisted this script and created new meanings through practice and discourse. The resulting market “failure” was ultimately caused by the failure of Nokia's actor network to stabilize a coherent narrative around sidetalking.
Sidetalking's breakdown had immediate organizational consequences: the Nokia 7700 was canceled, its successor removed the feature, and the N-Gage platform was gradually abandoned. However, even as the original vision unraveled, sidetalking persisted as a curiosity in public memory. Over time, new narratives reframed the feature as ahead of its time or at least as a curious, memorable misstep worth preserving. This process of redomestication softened the contours of failure, repositioning sidetalking within evolving narratives of design experimentation and media convergence. What may be dismissed as a design misstep at one moment can later be reinterpreted as innovation, depending on how it is remembered, recontextualized, and revalued. In this sense, sidetalking is a socio-technological artifact that exposes the tensions within design processes, the unpredictability of user meaning-making, and the uneasy temporality of technological change.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
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Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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Funding
Heikki Jungman's participation in this project was funded by the economic development program Smart Tampere. Olli Sotamaa and Tom Apperley's participation was funded by the Research Council of Finland project Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (CoE-GameCult, grants 353266).