Happy Five Months Old

Did you know that the Ovi Store has turned five months old?

The Ovi Store is Nokia’s version of Apple’s Apps Store, which contains a wide array of applications that are either free, free to try and buy. Not only does it showcase applications made for the different Nokia handsets but also has different items such as video and audio podcasts.

The Ovi store was launched in May 2009 with high anticipation and expectations from the Nokia users worldwide. Although it had some bumps and birth pains, it has slowly overcome the first few month jitters but not entirely perfect.

According to Mobileperry.com, Bill Perry, Sr. Services Marketing Manager for Forum Nokia based in California and is leading Nokia's global efforts to support developers for Ovi Store, explains the highlights of the past five months since the launch of the Ovi Store.

• The Ovi Store is now available on over 100 different Nokia devices (60+ Symbian S60 devices).
• There are about 180 countries that have active users on the Ovi Store. There are developers from 65 countries who are distributing content at the Ovi Store to around the world.
• There are eight countries today that have local content, local language support and mobile billing namely UK, Spain, France, Germany, Singapore, Australia, Italy and Russia. It is hoped that by the end of the first quarter of year 2010, there will be more than 20 countries involved with the same endeavor.
• The Top 10 Ovi Store Markets by performance in alphabetic order are namely Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Russia and the United Kingdom. In a related statistic, in almost all of the top 10 Ovi Store countries, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic and Nokia N97 are the number one and number two devices for Ovi Store activity and consumer engagement.
• The ability to re-download is now available at the Ovi Store. Also, the built-in search has much improved.
• Soon, the Ovi Store will ship embedded on most new compatible Nokia devices including the Symbian S60 and Series 40 starting fourth quarter of 2009.
• On average, each registered user has downloaded at least eight items from Ovi Store. In October, the number of content items downloaded was over 70% higher than in September.

Not bad for five months of development. Of course, there is so much room for improvement such as the very agonizing way of looking for applications that matter. Unfortunately, the Ovi Store at times becomes a place to download great applications and not-so-great ones too. I have seen worthless applications such as the EA Games application that only redirects you to their website. Who screens these programs anyway? However, business is picking up slowly with the introductions of free-to-try games that come from big time software companies such as Ubisoft’s Assasin’s Creed.

I would like to see more improvements in the Ovi Store. I want more precise categories and more free content. I don’t mind purchasing applications. But please try to screen them to make sure that we don’t just get crummy apps.

Update: Did you know that you can actually install the Ovi Store on the Satio as well? According to the Sony Ericsson Satio blog.

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