Brief Look at Ovi Store
Following in the footsteps of Apple, Google, and RIM, Nokia has finally gotten around to releasing their own central content store, the Ovi Store. Basically it combines the current Download! app with the Mosh download app and just gives Nokia some much needed centralization. It seems to stream line at lot of the “official” development process for devs and fixes the fees to something a bit more workable for smaller developers on S60, though probably not as good as Apple or Google yet, though there is still the option of installing unsigned app without crazy hacks on S60, unlike Apple. Being on one of the older platforms out there, the range of content is certainly varied, with support for S60 and S40 devices. The store has native apps and widgets for S60 along with Java apps, ring tones, wallpapers, and other media for both.
I’ve played with the Apple App Store on an iPod touch before, but I just downloaded a couple of apps that I needed, with the multitude of other apps seeming pretty worthless to me. The experience with the Ovi Store on my E71 has been pretty much the same. Of course having just launched, the Ovi Store does have less apps, but the number of useful apps already seems close(though more games for the E71 would be great). Despite the Ovi store being available for S40 devices, it looks like my fairly recent Nokia 3555 isn’t supported, so I can’t say a lot about the S40 side of the store, but I’m going to guess it’ll be more heavy on ringtones and similar media with some Java games thrown in.
Overall, I’d say the Ovi store doesn’t do anything revolutionary, just catches up with everyone else. While each store has it’s own little quirks, I’d rate it about even with the Apple App Store on overall experiance. Basically, I wouldn’t consider anyone’s app store a reason to go with a particular platform, just the fact that it has one, and now Nokia is in that crowd of “haves”.
