It has finally arrived, Xpilot over WAP.

In a attempt to make the WAP-standard more popular in Europe, an already quite popular Internetgame was ported to the WAP-compatible phones. Xpilot was chosen because it's simple graphics were ideal for the displays of the current WAP-phones.

After two months of intensive testing by several selected subjects in the range of 16 to 24 years old, several major WAP-phones, like the Nokia 7166 shown here, are now being standard equiped with Xpilot. Reactions from the testsubjects varied from "Amazing, this is really the kind of application that could give WAP the boost it needs." to "Can I keep this phone?".

The limited bandwidth of 9600 baud is still a problem, since Xpilot in it's original form requires a minimum of 33600 baud. Technicians hope to solve this problem by enhanced datacompression and reducing the number of frames per second. The reduction of the number of frames is not really a problem. This is because of the limited capabilities of the phonedisplay compared to those of the PC-monitor. One wouldn't get many frames on a phonedisplay anyway.

Another problem, but soon to be solved, is the creation of a natural keymapping. The PC-version uses quite a lot of keys. In fact almost all of the keyboard is used. The technicians at Nokia are solving this problem by dropping most of the non-essential keys and allow the player to assign these keys to other unused buttons on the phone.

According to Nokia the release of their updated mobile phone is planned in early 2003.
(source : cnn.com)
Actually as of 2009, it is actually possible to play XPilot on your mobile phone. That is, if it's an iPhone. XPilot iPhone. Who'd have thought...