Nokia and Elisa announced today that they will carry out a pilot of Nokia's new N-Gage mobile gaming service. The pilot will start in February 2007 and run until mid 2007. Elisa will combine its existing mobile gaming platform with the Nokia N-Gage gaming platform and carry out intensive testing and evaluation in a live network environment. The Gaming platform is scheduled to be available in mid this year!

"The core of the Nokia games strategy is to make it easy for people to find, buy and play great quality mobile games and we're excited to expand our relationship with Elisa to help make this possible," said Jaakko Kaidesoja, Director, Games, Multimedia, Nokia. "This pilot will help us further refine the N-Gage experience for our commercial launch later this year."

Nokia and Elisa will work together to bring a superior mobile gaming experience for Elisa customers. With the scheduled launch in mid 2007, Nokia's next generation mobile gaming platform makes it easy for people to find, buy, play and share rich and immersive games on a range of Nokia devices. Elisa intends to support the launch with a full service offering through its own portals in addition to the N-Gage application installed on Nokia devices.