Nokia’s response to Apple’s mobile applications marketplace has finally launched in a blaze of publicity – but hardly the kind the Finnish device maker can have hoped for.
Nokia announced the Ovi store in Barcelona in February, although its Ovi internet services brand has been around since August 2007. Clearly it has built up more anticipation than it could handle, as the “extraordinarily high spikes of traffic” caused the site to crash soon after opening. Even after downloading the Ovi software, some users reported seeing a limited selection of applications available in the store.
Steve Litchfield at the exhaustive All About Symbian also encountered several “teething troubles” and struggled with the user interface.
Techcrunch, typically, was more blunt, branding the launch a “complete disaster”.
Taking the pulse on Twitter suggested many other users agreed. For instance, Nick Piggot, head of creative technology at Global Radio, the UK commercial broadcaster, said Ovi was “very disappointing”, all the more so given the dominance its Symbian platform.
Of course, the overwhelming demand stems from the fact that Nokia has a lot more mobile phones out there than Apple, which launched its App Store over a year ago to great acclaim. Indeed, Nokia execs have been heard to grumble about the praise heaped on the iPhone applications market, given hundreds of third-party applications have been available for Symbian long before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye.
But the major improvement brought by Apple’s App Store was quality of experience – the apps are easy to find, easy to download and easy to pay for. The Ovi Store will overcome its opening-day wobbles, but they highlight the high bar Apple has set for the many operators and phone makers scrambling for a piece of the applications gold rush.
With so crowded a marketplace, Nokia will be hoping Ovi doesn’t suffer that more terrible fate than bad publicity: no publicity.
