There has already been a post on Ovi store on this blog right? Well, that post was more of an announcement and a small review of ovi store client on 5800. Now its been like 5 days since ovi store worldwide lauch and each of these 5 days, I have been browsing around ovi store. Lets see how people across the world responded to this launch and my personal experiences with ovi store for the last 5 days.

Launch

I was kinda lucky to be in one of the countries (Australia, Ireland, Singapore and Spain) where ovi store was soft launched a few hours before the world wide launch. By soft launch I mean the ovi store client was fully functional whereas the web version of ovi store (store.ovi.com) was not yet functional then. This was when things were running smoothly: I could browse around the store without having to wait for the pages to load and make payments for the paid applications. I thought I will come back later to buy some paid applications but I didn't know the wait would last this long, for the payment option has not been working ever since ovi store went online worldwide. Nokia has come under heavy criticism with this from the likes of techcrunch, who labeled ovi launch as an epic failure. Such was the outrage from the blogging community that Nokia Finland even rendered a public apology to pacify the irate users.

Client performance

Downloading ovi client was in itself a major roadblock for most of the Nokia users. While I was able to download this application pretty easily from the downloads menu, users across the world have been complaining about not being able to download the client. The client itself is not fully optimized for finger touch browsing, for many a times my attempt to scroll down was interpreted as a click and the description of the corresponding item was rendered. One more annoying thing is being asked to login everytime you want to download an application (not a concern if you never sign out from the ovi client on your phone). I mean I can understand the importance of logging-in for buying a paid application but for the free ones, I don't really see the need for logging-in to the system. One more annoying thing about the client is there is no proper indexing of applications like in utilities, messaging etc, so you are left browsing around in the application section for hours to find the right application. (Thanks to Mika for explaining how to go about indexed items). Some of the users have complained that the prices are not listed in the local currency adding to the frustration of potential buyers.

Applications

While I was pretty much impressed with the number of applications available on ovi store on the launch day, my options have been limited to free applications, since their payment option is not working. This has left me and most of the users complaining about the lack of a decent number of applications to play around with. Nokia should have ironed out basic aspects like payment before launching the store online. It was very much functional when it was soft launched in a few countries but I dont know what happened in a few hours, that rendered the payment system non functional.  I hope Nokia fixes this issue asap given the fact that its already been 5 days since its launch. I am not sure about other regions but I did find a few widgets for my region like the local news,  movies, bus guide etc.  I would like to read from the readers if they can see some regional widgets in the store.

Conclusion

These are still early days for ovi store and its not fair to compare it with the itunes App store but ovi really needs to fix a few basic issues like proper indexing, optimized touch browsing, displaying prices in local currency and for God's sake get the payment option working soon!

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