'Ovi store': Nokia's answer to Apple's App Store
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 26 May 2009, 22:56 IST   |    3 Comments
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'Ovi store': Nokia's answer to Apple's App Store
Bangalore: Amidst the stiff competition from Apple's App Store, Nokia on Monday rolled out its much-anticipated online software and content store named 'Ovi Store'. Nokia had promised to open the store globally this week. Nokia had been moving Ovi Store to production servers as a preparation for the global commercial launch. The store was opened to users of few of its phone models in Australia and Singapore on Monday. The Apple App Store is extremely popular, with nearly one billion applications downloaded within a year of its launch, prompting operators and technology firms including Vodafone, Nokia and Microsoft to vie for a piece of the pie by mulling similar launches. However, the analysts feel that firms are likely to struggle to match the success of Apple's store while creating their own stores due to the technical issues, lack of applications and increased competition. "Nokia's Ovi store is a step in the right direction but Apple is still the king of the hill when it comes to selling applications," said Ben Wood, Research Director at CCS Insight. "Nokia's Ovi Store lacks the blaze of publicity Apple was able to achieve when it burst onto the market - Nokia must spend a small fortune on marketing to make consumers aware of what it is offering," Wood said. Nokia, which made its first quarterly pretax loss in January-March, is cutting annual costs at its key handset unit by more than 700 million euros ($979.7 million) to counter the dip in phone demand. Nokia is trying to build a new business from mobile Internet services like games or maps. "Ovi Store is in some ways the last castle for Nokia - both N-Gage and 'Comes with Music' are industry laughing stocks," said Global Crown Analyst, Tero Kuittinen. Games and music have been spearheading Nokia's services push, but its mobile gaming offering has had little success, and its much-hyped music offering, which bundles free music downloads with a sold phone, has also found few clients. Nokia will also sell games and music through the Ovi Store. "Ovi Store is where Nokia tries to re-group and muster its forces for a counter-offensive," Kuittinen said. Analysts said Nokia's key opportunity in the battle between mobile software supermarkets lies in the scale of its phone business as it sells more than 400 million mobiles per year as compared with Apple's total of approximately 20 million iPhones. Gartner's Carolina Milanesi said, Nokia has to simplify its offering to the consumers while focusing on the social networking aspects, like friend referral in the Ovi store. "This is a much better way to help find the right app than the 'top 25' list," she said.

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