Nokia’s Ovi Store now open for business | News | Techie.com.ph
5:28 PM | Friday | 30 July 2010

Nokia's Ovi Store had its worldwide debut today, officially marking the Finnish company's face-off with mobile applications stores for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Google Android devices. Announced last February, Ovi -- Finnish for "open" -- allows users to download and personalize their handsets with free and paid applications, games, videos, and other media.

Tero Ojanperä, Nokia Services' executive vice president, considers the Ovi Store as one of the company's most ambitious rollouts. "We're aiming to provide the most compelling consumer content imaginable and that doesn't exclude the millions of Nokia consumers using feature phones."

The centralized application marketplace will work across a broad range of Nokia devices running on S40 and S60 systems.

Nokia users can go to the Ovi Store by simply typing store.ovi.com on their phone's browser. Once in the store, they can choose from over thousands of applications and media available for download, purchasable by credit card. Operator billing is also available. More applications and additional languages will be added throughout the year.

What could have been a triumphant launch quickly descended into a first-day fiasco. The store ended up suffering from sluggish, unresponsive pages and a tortuous navigation structure.

Apparently, the performance issues rooted in traffic-induced server problems. As stated in the apology statement released by Nokia, the problem was immediately addressed after additional server capacity was put up, balancing traffic and speeding up the downloading experience.