Nokia has struck a deal with Electronic Arts (EA) that will see EA become a major supplier of mobile games to the Finnish phone-maker through its Nokia Content Discoverer portal, a collection of e-stores currently embedded on nine handset models. It will be added to six more by the end of the year.

EA will initially make seven of its most popular titles - Tetris, Tetris Mania, The Sims, Doom, FIFA 06, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 06 and FIFA Street 2 - available as part of the deal this holiday season. A second stage of the partnership will see EA support the launch of Nokia's next generation mobile game platform with the release of games custom-designed for Nokia S60 devices starting in mid-2007.

The companies did not say how much the EA games for Nokia handsets would cost or what other titles might be on the way.

Nokia introduced its upcoming gaming platform and development tools last spring for the S60 interface, which runs on top of the Symbian OS. The aim is to bring better gaming to S60 as a whole - as opposed to just an individual device like N-Gage. The difficulty in developing for N-Gage, the perceived lack of support by Nokia, and high costs involved in development resulted in far fewer applications than users and operators had hoped for.

To give an indication of what type of titles we'd see, Nokia said the new development tools and consumer interface would be designed to empower the mobile games industry to create high quality 3D mobile games for its smartphones.

This week Nokia director of games & multimedia Jaakko Kaidesoja said, "The core of Nokia's 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 EA to help make that possible. Nokia and EA have a common vision regarding the opportunities in mobile games and how to turn them into a reality."

One estimate places the number of devices that would initially ship with the new gaming platform embedded at about 5 million, possibly rising to tens of millions in the ensuing years.

Informa Telecoms & Media said in March that the mobile gaming industry surpassed $2.43 billion in 2005, is projected to reach $4.02 billion this year, and could top $10.17 billion in revenue by the end of the decade. .