Nokia making touchscreen version of Dance Fabulous

Nokia is working on a touchscreen version of its Dance Fabulous N-Gage game, according to Mark Ollila, the company's director of X-Media Solutions.

He slipped the news in at the end of his presentation at today's Develop Evolve conference in Brighton, although he didn't say which phones the game is coming to.

We're assuming it'll hit the N97, but we're wondering if it could also make it to the 5800 XpressMusic handset, which isn't an N-Gage capable phone at the moment, but is music-focused with a big touchscreen.

What's more, the fact that it's a Comes With Music handset in several countries means users will have plenty of downloaded tracks to boogie along to in the game.

There were few clues to the future of N-Gage itself in Ollila's presentation, which focused on Dance Fabulous.

His X-Media Solutions role is interesting though: it's a new division that includes Nokia's first-party games publishing activities, but also other services like Ovi Share.

Comments from Ollila during his presentation suggest his role will at least partly focus on encouraging closer links between games and Nokia's other services, like music and maps - a theme that's been a regular in N-Gage presentations at other conferences in the last year or two.

What we're hoping is that even if the N-Gage brand is retired later this year, as has been rumoured, the company will still be actively working on bringing innovative games to Nokia's Ovi Store.

Watch this space. We might even pull some street dancing moves while you wait...