The news comes as Nokia conducts a series of closed door N-Gage developer and publisher workshops in Santa Monica and, next week, Madrid.

Speaking in an interview to be published in Mobile Entertainment magazine next week, Nokia's head of games Jaakko Kaidesoja said a GDC unveiling was highly likely.

"One of the main events for us is GDC in San Francisco in early March and that's really where you can expect some announcements," he said. "We will be present at 3GSM for various meetings, but we are gearing up to have more information at GDC."

Kaidesoja also played down continued speculation that a new games-optimised N-Gage device is on the way, stressing that the new N-Gage platform would be made available across a range of vanilla Series 60/Nseries devices right from the start.

“We’re working on gaming ergonomics across our range, but there are no plans for new a N-Gage device at the moment,” he says. “For sure it’s a hot topic and everyone wants to know about it, but first and foremost we want to bring the new platform to market and make sure it works across a range of devices.”

So there you have it. However, given Nokia’s strategy to optimise its Nseries devices for content verticals like TV, music, web access and imaging, we’d perhaps be foolish to rule out one for games.