Posts Tagged ‘Ovi’

Nokia dumps location-based service Friend View, falls in love with Facebook

by Steve O'Hear

September 2nd, 2009 | Posted in Mobile, Social | CommentsNo Comments

During the opening keynote at Nokia World, which kicked off today, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was at pains to point out that the handset maker didn’t view Internet “services” as an interesting side business but that it was still the future of the company.

And along with music, messaging and turn-by-turn navigation, location-aware social networking, which the company calls SoLo, and other types of location-based services are key to this future. After all, Nokia has invested heavily in GPS-related technologies and applications, the boldest example being the $8.1 billion purchase of Navteq in late 2007.

What was and still is unclear is how much of Nokia’s SoLo strategy involves building out its own social networking offerings or partnering with and supporting established social networks. With today’s announcement of a tie up with Facebook and with it the death of the company’s own ‘Friend View’, with regards to the simplest of ‘SoLo’ applications — share my current location with friends — the handset maker has seen sense and decided to do the latter.

Continue reading »

Nokia's Ovi Store day one: why aren't the best S60 apps being promoted?

by Steve O'Hear

May 26th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | CommentsNo Comments

Ovi Store - Why isn't Gravity featured?

Why isn't Gravity being promoted?

It’s day one of the Ovi Store, Nokia’s answer to the iPhone App Store, along with similar offerings from BlackBerry and Google. To say the roll out hasn’t been as smooth as the handset maker would have liked is an understatement to say the least. The service has been plagued by problems, such as really, and I mean really, slow load times, connection errors, the inability for some users to log-in using their existing Ovi account details, and applications disappearing and reappearing in the store itself.

However, as time has passed, things are beginning to settle down. My own experience on my Nokia E71 is that the mobile client for the Ovi Store has steadily improved in performance throughout the day, and at the time of publication – approx 5pm London time – the service is certainly usable, if not as speedy as the iPhone’s App Store — yet.

On the downside, I’m still unable to log-in to the Ovi Store on the desktop (Firefox running on a Mac) where I’m greeted each time with an error: “Sorry, you cannot sign in at this time. Try again later.” In its defense, Nokia says that it has been frantically adding additional servers to cope with “extraordinarily high spikes of traffic” — traffic that it surely should have anticipated.  Teething issues aside, what about the store itself?

Continue reading »

Nokia's Ovi app store launches [iPhone envy]

by Steve O'Hear

May 25th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | CommentsNo Comments

ovi-storeNokia has begun rolling out its new app store – the Ovi Store – for both S60 and S40-powered handsets. It’s already available in Australia and a growing list of other countries. No UK or US availability — yet, however. I’ll update this post when and if that changes.

Update: the Ovi Store has launched in the UK and US now, although the service is slow and unreliable as Nokia, presumably, attempts to scale it live. Hopefully this will be sorted in the next day or so. It’s early days but not the best of starts.

Announced at Mobile World Congress back in February, the Ovi Store is the handset maker’s direct response to Apple’s phenomenally successful App Store for the company’s iPhone and iPod touch devices. Here’s what I wrote when the Ovi Store was first unveiled at MWC:

The Ovi Store will offer “a range of content including applications, games, videos, widgets, podcasts, location-based applications and personalised content”, and will be available on both S60 and Series 40 devices. The first handset to ship with the store pre-installed will be the recently announced Nokia N97, which is set to launch by June. Sensibly, Nokia will also make the Ovi Store available to existing S60 and Series 40 handsets through a simple download in May. Revenue from paid-for apps will be split 70/30 in the developer’s favor, exactly the same deal offered by the iPhone’s App Store. All very Apple-esqe, so far.

However, here’s where Nokia is at least attempting to be different: “Ovi Store is unique in its ability to target content based on where you are, when you’re there, why you are where you are and who else has downloaded similar content”, all of which fits perfectly with the company’s ambitious Social Location (SoLo) strategy.

For those countries where the Ovi Store is already available, users need to navigate to the now legacy Download! app and refresh for new content. The Ovi Store app can then be found in the “Nokia Extras” folder or “Promo” folder, depending on handset and region.

Nokia ramps up music ambitions; three new handsets, Nokia Music Store and 'Comes With Music' expansion

by Steve O'Hear

March 11th, 2009 | Posted in Audio, Mobile | CommentsNo Comments

Perhaps to the disdain of mobile carriers, Nokia continues to ramp up its own music offering. Three new music-focused handsets were announced today, along with expansion of the company’s own music download store and all-you-can-eat ‘Comes With Music’ subscription-based offering.

Of the three new handsets, the most interesting is the higher end XpressMusic 5730 (available Q3, €280), which is Nokia’s first music phone to feature a full (slide out) QWERTY keyboard, and just like the 5800, runs the company’s Symbian S60 smartphone OS. The 5730 is being pitched as both a music-centric and messaging – think email, IM and social networking – device, featuring a redesigned home screen that gives shortcut access to the phone’s music library, and the socially-aware ‘contacts’ bar, which is able to pull in the latest communication and RSS feeds from up to 20 of a user’s most important contacts.

Continue reading »

Nokia announces 'Ovi' mobile app store – is that a Facebook app I see?

by Steve O'Hear

February 16th, 2009 | Posted in Mobile | Comments1 Comment

MySpace and Facebook are cited as early partners

Apple may not have a physical presence at this week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, but the company’s influence can be seen everywhere. Not least in Nokia’s newly announced third-party application store.

The Ovi Store will offer “a range of content including applications, games, videos, widgets, podcasts, location-based applications and personalised content”, and will be available on both S60 and Series 40 devices. The first handset to ship with the store pre-installed will be the recently announced Nokia N97, which is set to launch by June. Sensibly, Nokia will also make the Ovi Store available to existing S60 and Series 40 handsets through a simple download in May. Revenue from paid-for apps will be split 70/30 in the developer’s favor, exactly the same deal offered by the iPhone’s App Store. All very Apple-esqe, so far.

Continue reading »

The real surprise of the App Store isn't number of downloads or revenue

by Steve O'Hear

August 11th, 2008 | Posted in Mobile | Comments10 Comments

That the iPhone’s App Store has delivered 60 million downloads and generated an average of $1 million a day in revenue since its launch a month ago isn’t all that surprising.

To begin with, the App Store couldn’t be any easier to use. All apps available to purchase and download either from the familiar iTunes Store or from the device itself. Next, factor in Apple’s marketing machine, the quantity and quality of apps available from Day One – many of which are free – combined with the fact that the typical iPhone owner has cash to spare and an early adopter mentality geared towards trying out new things, and you have a surefire hit on your hands.

Instead, the real surprise is that the carriers – AT&T in the U.S. and 02 in the UK – agreed to Apple launching the App Store in the first place. Or more specifically, that Apple could offer the App Store in the manner in which they have done.

Continue reading »