Nokia topped off a bevy of handset announcements at the MWC show in Barcelona, with news that it would merge almost all of its cellular services into a new type of applications store at its Ovi portal.
Marco Argenti, VP media at Nokia said, ‘We are going to consolidate all distribution services into one easy to find channel, and we are not just selling applications here, but widgets, video, themes, wallpapers, games, audio and Adobe Flash applications.
But the entire idea behind the new Ovi store is that it will use what Nokia calls social location to make you offers, and Argenti described the overall idea of social location as, ‘If you enter an airport, it might offer you departure data, if it knows you have a ticket it might offer you GPS guidance to the gate. If you are traveling with someone, it might offer to email them to tell them you have arrived.’
So presumably the store will offer to sell you things which are also relevant to where you are. Nokia says that all offers will go through a relevancy engine, which will work on data that you enter into the system about what prices you are happy to see products at, on what devices, and in which categories, in which markets.
The Nokia Ovi store will allow any media publishers to publish data and keep 70% of the price, said Argenti, and customers will either be able to buy from the store using credit cards or through the operator billing system. If a operator takes a slice of the payment for using his billing, Ovi will share 70% of what’s left with the information publisher.
Nokia also said it would offer channels co-branded with operators and proceeded to launch one with T-Mobile later the same day, opening up an integrated marketplace for mobile content and Internet services where you could buy from the existing T-Mobile store or from Ovi. If the same thing is available in both stores you would be shown to the cheaper option.
The integrated T-Mobile marketplace will be available during the second half 2009 on mass market Nokia Series 40 platform based phones, while Ovi Store will be out in May in its first nine countries ‘ mostly Western Europe with a special effort for the US. It says that it will have at least one operator in each of those countries which has a special relationship with Nokia over operator billing, and that this initial 9 countries will rise rapidly to 50.
Nokia says that Ovi Store will have advanced content targeting which allows content providers to leverage the Nokia’s global scale in devices. Content providers, developers and the existing Forum Nokia developers can begin uploading content from March onwards to publish.ovi.com.
The Ovi Store will consolidate existing Nokia services including Download!, MOSH, WidSets and Nokia Music Store to a single channel and content will be for Nokia Series 40 and S60 devices. The Nokia N97, available in June, will be the first device to include the storefront, but Nokia will initially upgrade some 50 million devices in the field over the cellular network, to use Ovi Store and by 2012 reckons it will have 300 million devices connected. Initially there will be an SHTML store too for PCs, but not with sideloading to the handset, that will come later.
The system will also tell your friends what you have bought (if you activate that feature). Also although Nokia will only take content from a limited company, it can have a staff of one, so anyone can become a publisher of software or content. It will have a minimal ‘quality gate’ to ensure that the application runs, but Nokia says that it plans to initially approve content within a week and later within 48 hours.
N-Gage games will be part of the store but Nokia feels that the gaming community would have lots of extras features it may benefit from so there will also continue to be a separate N-Gage community.
With the industry’s largest footprint of Adobe Flash supported devices, Ovi Store will a distribution channel for applications commissioned by the Adobe and Nokia in its $10 million Open Screen Project fund. Forum Nokia already has a community of 3.5 million developers creating hundreds of thousands of apps, and these will now all go through the Ovi Store.
On the device front or Nokia at the show, perhaps the most exiting new phone was the 5630 XpressMusic ultra slim phone with 4GB of memory and 22 hours of playback and a new ‘say and play’ voice recognition system for saying either the name of the track or the artist to trigger the playing of a new song. It is due out in the second quarter for around €199.
The other phones included a refresh of various classics ‘ the new 2700; multiple upgrades to the 6300 range which has sold 40 million devices in 3 years; the 6710 navigator and the 6720 classic; more data about the N97 and the E71, the top of the range enterprise phone and the E75.
There is also the N86, the top end Nokia camera phone using wide-angle Carl Zeiss optics and an 8 megapixel sensor, designed to be better than most existing standalone cameras on the market. This will ship in the second quarter at around €375, before taxes and subsidies.