Nokia launched its Ovi store featuring games, applications, podcasts and videos Monday to a rocky start as users faced problems accessing the store and downloading the programs.
“Shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 a.m. ET, we began experiencing extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi,” said Eric John, head of product marketing for Nokia Ovi in a blog post. “We immediately began to address this issue by adding servers, which resulted in intermittent performance improvements. ”
The problems with Ovi’s launch do not bode well for Nokia, which has been struggling to better Apple’s app store offerings. Nokia has lagged other mobile platforms such as Research In Motion’s BlackBerry and Google’s Android OS, both of which launched their own app stores months ago.
Ovi is seen as Nokia’s answer to Apple’s iTunes and iPhone app store as it consolidates free and paid content . The Ovi store can be accessed by about 50 million Nokia device owners worldwide including the soon-to-be launched N97 device. The store will have more than 20,000 titles at launch, said Nokia. Nokia customers can visit Ovi thorugh their phone’s browser to personalize and downloads services and programs.
“Ovi is open for business and we’ve stocked the shelves with both local and global content for a broad range of Nokia devices,” said Tero Ojanper, Executive Vice President, Nokia Services in a statement. “Ovi Store makes shopping for content and applications easy for feature phone and smartphone owners alike.”
But some Nokia fans aren’t pleased. Inability to access the Ovi store on launch isn’t the only trouble that users say they faced. Allaboutsymbian.com, a web site that follows Nokia closely, pointed out that the Ovi store does not offer a clear distinction between Java and native Symbian apps. The performance of the store client was also slow and the store did not have much content, said the site.
Despite these hiccups, the Ovi store won’t be immediately available in the U.S. AT&T, which sells some Nokia phones, has said it will offer access to Ovi to its customers only later this year. It may have turned out to be a good move as it will give Nokia time to sort out the bugs in the store.
Photo: Ovi store rendering on Nokia N97 (dekuwa/Flickr)
Sphere: Related ContentPosted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by publisher on May 26, 2009
