May 26th, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Distribution | 5 Comments »
Nokia opened the doors to their Ovi Store. 50 Million consumers worldwide will now be able to pick up mobile games and applications directly from the service.
The launch of the store didn’t go without problems. Bloggers all over the world report long waiting times and disappearing content. According to Nokia’s Ovi blog, huge traffic peaks are the cause.
The Ovi Store covers 50 Nokia devices like the N-Gage and XpressMusic series. In most of the countries, purchases are only accepted via Credit Card. Nokia added direct operator billing in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Spain, the UK and Singapore. More countries will be added soon.
Nokia gives a kickback of 70% to developers that sell their apps on the portal. Of course the portal also supports free downloads, which is very interesting for ad-funded titles.
Symbian-Guru wrote a good story on the user experience and found some points where Nokia could improve the service.
For me the problem here is the current strict requirement for Java Verified for publishers and developers on the Ovi Store, with regards to costs and end ROI to get on this deck with any of my Java mobile content. Therefore until this changes (I very much doubt it too) I’m out on this one sadly 😛
Ovi isnt working at all on my Nokia! They delayed the OVI for ages why did none of them tested it before? Developers have to be Java Verify but they dont care about quality and the user experience.
Nokia has too proof that they can handle content, till now they failed several times with N-Gage, Shop Nokia, Preminet, Snap, etc.
Please suprise me one time Nokia. OVI is your last chance!
I haven’t been able to verify the story, but there are rumors that Java Verified is not being checked.
That is a pretty interesting rumour that I hope becomes true! 🙂
I see some of the usual big players on there as expected.
I do agree with ‘Spam’ that they really do need to get it right this time.
After a little bit of digging myself this morning, I found this interesting post which was actually linked from the Nokia Ovi Publisher Forums…
http://blogs.s60.com/2009/05/ovi-store-not-requiring-java-verified