Apple and Research in Motion got some competition for smartphone applications Tuesday as Nokia opened its Ovi Store. There were early reports of problems accessing the store, which Nokia attributed to high traffic starting about 2 a.m. Eastern time. The company said it added servers to the store’s site for intermittent performance improvements.
Nokia described the Ovi Store as an evolving media service that consolidates the handset maker’s existing content services into a one-stop online shop for free and paid items. Nokia said thousands of the industry’s biggest content providers, along with independent application developers. are distributing media, applications and games through the store. The company didn’t offer specifics about how revenue is split with developers.
The Ovi Store is open to the approximately 50 million Nokia owners who use more than 50 Nokia devices. Customers can visit the store through their Nokia device browser to download and personalize applications, games, videos, podcasts, productivity tools, and Web and location-based services.
“Ovi Store is open for business and we’ve stocked the shelves with both local and global content for a broad range of Nokia devices,” said Tero Ojanpera, executive vice president of Nokia services. “Ovi Store makes shopping for content and applications easy and fun for feature phone and smartphone owners alike.”
Adding AT&T to the Mix
Ojanpera didn’t mention Apple’s App Store or RIM’s App World for BlackBerry devices in the announcement. Both companies have a head start on the Ovi Store. But Nokia has a large user base that analysts expect will welcome the applications, despite the handset maker’s late entry to the app-store party. Nokia is the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile devices and has the largest market share.
The Ovi Store’s software uses many of the languages of the countries in which Nokia does business, including English, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. The…