Nokia Faces Uphill Struggle After Ovi App Store Glitches

Nokia, the largest mobile phone manufacturer, might have thought that the (re)launch today of its new App Store, Ovi, was going to be a sinecure but it was proved sorely wrong.

We have been trying to use OVI in the UK, in the morning although the app store has not been launched officially here. Using a Nokia 6220 Classic phone, navigation was snappy but the "store" was helplessly empty.

Going online, the site (https://store.ovi.com/) appeared to be very slow in the morning and surprise, surprise, the 6220 Classic is wrong listed on OVI which means that there's no application for us. This despite the fact that the phone is less than a year old and is Symbian-based.

The store also pesters you to register your mobile phone details which is quite annoying if you only want to scroll around instead. OVI Store offers the 5800 Xpressmusic by default.

As mentioned earlier today, most of the applications are paid and most are non-business. Ovi responded to the claims of crawling server access by saying that they experienced extraordinarily "high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi"

This is a bit underwhelming given the fact that Nokia has tens of millions of users that could have used OVI at any time. They clearly did not plan for the worst case scenario and the Finnish manufacturer did forget that Apple has already set the benchmark.

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