Yeah, finally Nokia's OVI store is now LIVE in Australia, Ireland, Singapore and Spain with  phased launches in other parts of the globe. Who knows, by the time you read this post, OVI store may be up and running in your very own country. Till then, roll back and enjoy this exclusive review of OVI store on Nokia 5800.

Alarmed by the success of Apple's App store which boasts of more than a billion application downloads in less than a year, every major smartphone company  is coming up with their own App stores. RIM's APPworld and Android's Android Market have been roaring ever since their launches early this year. Not to be left far behind, Nokia had promised its customers its very own App store with over 20,000 items in the store on its inaugural launch. Well, Nokia has stood by its word with its launch of Ovi store today, while there is no feasible way to check with its 20,000 items (items and not applications!) claim, lets just take their word on that for the time being.

Ovi Store is now available on Nokia E75, 5800 and N97 (In other words, 5800 users just made it to the list considering the fact that E75 was just launched in April 09 and N97 is yet to be launched). Ovi Store will come pre-installed on Nokia's flagship device N97 whereas for the other two devices, Ovi store has to be installed manually (atleast for the devices already in market today). In order to download Ovi store  on your 5800s, go to menu-> downloads-> ovi store. Please note the downloads screen will take a while (~10 s) to load if you have not opened it recently. Clicking on Ovi store in downloads menu will download and auto install the Ovi store application on your 5800s. It took me around 30 seconds to download and install this application over wi-fi. Once installed, you can access the store either from menu-> downloads-> Ovi store or menu-> applications-> Ovi store. Lets see what the Ovi store has to offer for us.

Ovi store goes a step ahead of its competition by incorporating audio and video content in the same store, meaning you can now browse/shop for all the multimedia and application content at one store, exclusive for selected symbian devices. In layman terms, you can download everything from ringtones,  wallpapers to trailers and paid applications at this one very convenient store. In order to enjoy the benefits of this service, one needs to sign up for an ovi account (which you would already have if you are using ovi backup and synchronisation services). One needs to login into ovi store using their ovi accounts prior to downloading any items from the ovi store. You can sign up for a free Ovi account here.

There are a tons of free applications in every category and abundant paid applications to chose from too. Cashing in on the popularity of Star Trek, ovi store has   wallpapers, ringtones, trailers and something called tv spots. Just click on the item and it will start downloading, provided you have already logged in to ovi store. In all there are five categories in the store: Recommended, Applications, Audio and Video, Games and Applications. You can keep track of all the downloads  by clicking  on the "My stuff" tab which displays all the status of all the downloading/downloaded items. In case you were wondering, simultaneous downloads of two or more items is supported.

Like an application/item? You can rate an item or even write a brief review for the item right from your phone in the very same store. If you see closely on the left most screenshot, you will see a "Send to friend" link too. Haven't go the chance to see how this works yet but am glad that there is an option of sharing your applications/items with your friends. So go ahead and help the symbian world by spreading the word across your family and friends by promoting the applications you like.

Want to buy a paid application? You will need a credit card to make a purchase and as can be seen from the screenshots to the left, all the major credit cards are accepted and there is an option to save your card details to your Nokia account saving you the trouble of logging your credit card details each time you buy an application/item on the ovi store.

I assume (or rather hope) there is some encryption when relaying the credit card details to their servers. There is an option to bill the application/item to your monthly cellular bill but that needs to be incorporated by your service provider which may take some time.

Success of an app store largely depends on the number of applications available and going by the list available today, its pretty impressive. There are tons of free applications to chose from and a pretty exhaustive list of paid applications too. However there is no way to preview or try an application before buying it, which is something I would like to see in the ovi store. Take a look at the gallery below to get a preview of various applications/items available on the ovi store.

P.S- I am sorry for the irritating watermark on the header and footer of the above images. A trial version of photo editor messed up my images.

P.P.S- Just read that Ovi store is available everywhere across the globe now

UPDATE

OVI store is now available across the world and one can access it online at http://store.ovi.com. You can browse through the store online on your desktop and download the applications of your choice on the desktop or send the link to your phone. I have not been able to buy an applicaiton on the OVI wap store since last evening when it went live across the globe. Am guessing the OVI servers are overloaded with increased traffic to their store on their launch day. Lets hope they fix this soon and we  can enjoy the full feature set of OVI store soon.

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