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Nokia showed up on the radar a few days ago when it confirmed that the Ngage isn't going to see an update in the near future, casting doubt on the phone's future existence. But that's largely because Nokia is eying the potential of the smart phone market. So it went into the woods and found the juiciest convergence buck to strap over its hood.

It's not that I want to equate Nokia's new series to drunken hunters chasing down a road with carrion flapping in the wind, but it is rather hard to take anything in the convergence market seriously right now.

It's the new buzzword for any company desperately trying to break into the emerging technology culture, one so sudden that it even caught the companies who should be in the thick of it off-guard. Microsoft can't believe how Google stole its glory and Sony has no idea how the company that made the Walkman had to trip over MP3 players.

Mobile phone players face an even bigger challenge. The fact is that as far as a phone goes, one day we'll all have one and not need much more from it than to be a phone. So the market is bound to cap, bar to odd upgrades.

To keep that upgrade curve healthy, you need to give people something they can use in addition. So far phone cameras have proven popular and multimedia applications like MMS, Java games and MP3 ringtones are effective, if latent, reasons for people to upgrade.

But the growing appeal of mobile devices such as game consoles and personal digital assistant expanded the potential for mobile phones incredibly. The biggest problem remains how to put so much into something so small, yet avoid clutter, slowdown and just general user alienation. Many expensive lessons have been learned in this race, leading to my hunter analogy. Thus the new Nseries is being approached with skepticism, since it saturates itself in these mobile convergence ideals.

Nokia's Nseries is its sub-brand for the uber-smart phone of the future. High def cameras, video, broadband, built-in office suits, music players, print-quality photos — all these attributes are being spread through the brand's three initial phones: the N90, N70 and N91.

Each defines itself with a different design — the N90 has an interesting twist shape that molds it into a video camera. It's not unlike your first Transformers toy, though a lot easier to fold and unfold. The Nokia rep called it a camera with a phone built into it, but I wasn't that sold on the claim; video quality is fair, but the footage given to us that was shot over the evening was dark and low in definition.

Theoretically the daylight movies are a lot nicer (judging by a clip Nokia showed us), but the camera-with-a-phone line barely holds. It's a good phone video camera, but no challenge to the real thing.

That said, no models were given out to review as yet, so there's no significant detail on what the N90 can do and if the features can be tweaked. It's quite possible that the staff recording the video didn't know the phone that well. A video camera, after all, isn't as highly intuitive as a phone and requires some more mental legwork to truly harness.

The N70 and N91 weren't made available for review either, but both seem interesting and I definitely look forward to trying them out. The N91 boasts music support for up to three gigabytes of files, plus music purchases using WMA and Microsoft's DRM, though the phone is said to support multiple file types.

Will it be better than Apple and Motorola's Rokr phone? Frankly, anything can be and the Sony Walkman phone isn't being that warmly received either.

Nokia previously had MP3 models in the 3300 and original Ngage, but both features have been discontinued. The N91 has a few advantages — most notably a partnership with Bose, JBL and Sennheiser, so there are big names involved here (but apart from Sennheiser delivering the headset, there's no clarity yet on what these partnerships bring to the phone).

The imaging side is also heavily supported by strong brand names such as HP and Kodak. During the event, the staff took photos on the N90 and sent it via Bluetooth to a HP photo printer. It's nothing new, but it's a nice feature and something worth geeking out about, unless you've already been doing it using HP's own PDA smart phones or you can't afford the HP printer.

Convergence is the key word here. These phones put a lot of features into one design. If you sidestep the marketing lines for a moment, the idea isn't a bad one and while I doubt any of these devices will challenge your favouritism for your digicam, MP3 player or PDA, they are the newest soldiers in the battle to bring everything to mobile.

Nokia's design and interface sensibilities hold, making the Nseries a bigger deal personally than some other offerings. But the Finnish cellphone maker has burnt its fingers several times with over-ambitious projects.

The Nseries falls more in line with current industry innovations than ground-breaking ideas, so perhaps Nokia is playing it safe. And playing it safe might mean the Nseries will make a big impact.

But that's on paper, we'll see how the phones hold up in practice.