Ovi Goes Live!
Posted on: May 29, 2009 by admin
Some of you might know that this week saw the launch of Nokia’s new and eagerly awaited online software application store entitled Ovi, which my very good Finnish tells me is indeed Finnish for ‘door’. Obviously the intention of this new venture is to rival that of the iPhone app store, but do Nokia have a case?
The overwhelming populartity of applications or “apps” is something that Apple are no strangers to of course, having witnessed a whopping 1 billion application downloads worldwide in less than a year, now many other manufacturers and software developers are keen to get a look in. Those in the know, however, have been saying that it is highly unlikely any other manufacturers or developers will be able to repeat this success due to a lack of applications, marketing, relevant knowledge and inablity to compete with the already well established competition.
“Nokia’s Ovi store is a step in the right direction but Apple is still the king of the hill when it comes to selling applications,” said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight.
In Nokia’s defense, what they are doing is actually a pretty smart, if plucky venture. The fact of the matter is, they are trying to diversify and explore other rvenue streams by providing services and products for existing customers in a saturated and declining market. That said, previous ventures such as N-Gage and Comes With Music proved to be…well, not so successful. We hope that Ovi store does well and considering Nokia is without doubt the largest manufacturer of mobile phones, selling in excess of 400 million phones a year compared to Apples 20 million, we believe the Ovi store can be a success.
The last time we checked Ovi had only been accessible to a handful of users of Nokia phones in Australia and Singapore, although it was mooted that the store would be globally accessible by the end of this week. If any of you have or are intending to use Ovi to download its offerings which include music, maps and games, then we’d be very interested to hear about your experiences here at Touchscreen Fones.
You can check out what Ovi has to offer by heading over to the Nokia Ovi site.
Haven’t bought anything yet but Ovi does look good.
No way going to be as successful as iTunes apps but worth trying to lessen Apple’s monopoly on the apps market. Go Nokia!