Nokia duly delivered on its promise to launch its Ovi Store ‘ a merger between all of the things its sells directly to handsets ‘ games, music and video ‘ and says that at launch it is available to 50 million devices.
And in what appears to be a major US victory, Nokia says that AT&T Mobility will make Ovi Store available to its customers in the US later this year. That pre-supposes that AT&T may need to offer Nokia more carrier deals for devices in the US ‘ perhaps even its new flagship the N97. Considering that Nokia has a near 40% market share globally in handsets and just 10% in the US, this deal may drive up its US standing. An N97 deal certainly would.
In February at the Mobile World Congress Nokia declared its intention to create Ovi Store, as a direct rival to Apple App Store, and said it would initially reach 50 million devices but go on to be available to reach 300 million by the end of 2012.
The Ovi Store consolidates existing Nokia services including Download!, MOSH, WidSets, Nokia Music Store and N-Gage games to a single channel and content will work on both Nokia Series 40 and S60 devices. Nokia will also add Maps (from Navteq) and other location services to Ovi.
The Nokia N97, available in June, will be the first device to include the storefront without the need for a Nokia driven upload, but Nokia will initially upgrade some 50 million devices in the field over the cellular network. Initially there will be an HTML store too for PCs, but not with sideloading to the handset, that will come later.
But no sooner than Nokia announced that it was open for business than the weight of traffic crashed some of its servers and it had to drag in more server power to get services back online.
The Ovi Store launch was plagued by technical problems, mainly performance issues related to high spikes of traffic. Later on the day of launch, the store was working well, after reports of glacially slow load times and complete outages, with some US pundits calling it a disaster. It was a similar disaster that stopped the Sony Connect service ever taking off, with most customers on day one being turned away at the door, a step it never recovered from.
The mobile Ovi client is available in English, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish and supports operator billing in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom. What that means is that at least one operator in each of those territories has partnered with Ovi and can charge Nokia purchases to the customer’s monthly phone bill. Credit card billing is also available.
The Nokia Ovi store allows any media publishers to publish data or applications and keep 70% of the price. If an operator takes a slice of the payment for using his billing, Ovi will give 70% of what’s left to the information publisher.