Finnish mobileco Elisa has signed up to pilot Nokia’s latest incarnation of its N-Gage mobile gaming service.

Elisa will combine its existing mobile gaming platform with the N-Gage gaming platform and will carry out intensive testing and evaluation in a live network environment.

Nokia’s next generation N-Gage platform is intended to make it easier for customers to find, buy, play and share games on a range of Nokia devices.

Elisa will support the service through its own portals in addition to the N-Gage application installed on Nokia devices.

The pilot starts this month and runs until mid 2007, when Elisa is scheduled to push the service live.

“The core of the Nokia 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 Elisa to help make this possible,” said Jaakko Kaidesoja, director of games and multimedia at Nokia. “This pilot will help us further refine the N-Gage experience for our commercial launch later this year.”