Nokia is attempting to make a splash this summer with a new phone and a new app store to go with it. Executives from the Finnish phone maker have been teasing about an application store dubbed Ovi for some time, but this week Niklas Savander, Nokia’s executive vice president of services, told Forbes it will launch as the largest app store to date, boasting 20,000 apps.
Similar to Apple’s App Store model, Ovi Store developers will receive 70 percent of the revenue for applications and content sold through the store. Ovi, which is the Finnish word for door, was created to stand out from competitors, including Apple’s store, Microsoft’s Marketplace, and Google’s Android Market, through its focus on personalization.
“It’s the open gateway to all of your music, photos, maps and games, as well as your social networks and communities,” according to Nokia’s Web site describing Ovi. “You can access it on your Mac or PC, on a Nokia device and on any other connected mobile device.”
The user’s shopping experience can be customized using social-networking information, including purchases their friends have made. “I think that the personalization approach is the right way to go and certainly a differentiation at the moment,” said Carolina Milanesi, a Gartner analyst.
“As far as competition, I think Nokia is putting in place a wider offering with OVI that will have more to give than an app store-only offering, as is the case for Blackberry, for instance,” Milanesi said. “The number of users Nokia is targeting with its devices is of course very appealing to developers.”
“However, we need to also take into account that people that use S60 devices might not be power users in the same way iPhone users or Nseries users are,” Milanesi added.
While Nokia aims to offer Ovi services to more phones than…