Ovi Store Goes Live!

Ovi Store has officially gone live! https://store.ovi.com/

This is one of Nokia’s most important undertakings of recent years. The Ovi store is Nokia’s attempt to take back the reigns in the Smartphone world by delivering those oh so crucial applications easily to users, enhancing the usability of their Nokia devices.

It’s not just for smartphones, nor is it just applications – currently supporting around 119 Nokia devices with videos, ringtons, games and wallpapers. Choosing a particular device narrows the selection of compatible content.

A while back, I wrote about Ovi being the best feature on the N97, and that the ease at which Nokia deliver these applications (and other content) will make or break Ovi and Nokia’s future success with Smartphones. Yes, as will the actual content of the store is also a major factor, but what’s more important is getting users to:

1. know that their Nokia device has access to a wealth of applications and Media through the Ovi Store
2. have the easiest experience in finding, downloading and (if it’s an application) installing that content.

A few criticisms on the desktop experience – hopefully it’s just because it’s new and/or can’t handle the load of people trying it out:

• Where are the categories? Please divide content into categories – I don’t want to wade through huge masses of applications which could easily be filtered into categories. I like that they’ve got a filter for Free and Paid content – easy for stocking up on the freebies.
• It’s really slow – switching from anything the screen takes an awful long while to load my current selection. By an awful long while, I mean a slug covered in salt can probably circle the earth quicker than this site loads anything. Probably will be fixed (better be!) but not really good as a first impression. The longer I spend on it the more annoyed I get.
• Applications need more than just an icon and a block of text for description. At least for the desktop version, there should be some screenshots of the application in action, and best, a short video demonstration to show what the app is going to do. Some have screenshots – some don’t. This needs uniformity. For free content it’s not so much of an issue, but when I’m paying for an application, I’d like to see what it does beyond the text description. It will take a lot of effort to do this, but will improve the usability in the long run.

With 50 million devices ready for Ovi Store, Nokia certainly have the install base. It just needs a few more tweaks to get it just right.

Via Nokia Conversations

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Ah – What I’d love to more time testing out Ovi yet instead I have to focus on neuroanatomy 🙁 .

Tags: Nokia, OVI, Ovi Store

Category: OVI