Following in the footsteps of the App Store by Apple, App World by BlackBerry and the upcoming Windows Marketplace from Microsoft, Nokia have just released their new store for downloading Apps and other content to your phone.
The new OVI store is designed to make it easier to download applications directly to your phone, without having to connect to your PC first, and is available as a free download to everyone with a compatible phone – currently Nokia handsets running Symbian 60 (N-Series, 5800, E-Series etc)
To get the Ovi store on your phone, you need to download it using the ‘Download!’ service on your phone. You’ll need to refresh the content in order for it to show up, and once downloaded and installed you’ll be able to browse the store for new apps. If you don’t have the download service on your phone, you can also visit store.ovi.com.
Even though it’s still early days for the Ovi store, for my Nokia N82 there were still over 550 paid apps available and 64 free apps with prices ranging from £1.50 to over £40. Content in the store is broken down in to 4 categories, Applications, Audio & Video, Games and Ringtones, and you can filter by free/paid.
Downloading content isn’t quite as seamless as the App Store on the iPhone, but no doubt over time this will only get better.
To use the Ovi Store, you will need to have an Ovi account, but if you already use any of the other Ovi Services (Share, Contacts, Files, Maps, Calendar, Mail, N-Gage, Music) then you’ll be able to use the store with your current sign in details, although to avoid any nasty billing surprises, it’s probably worth registering your credit or debit card, rather than having them charge your phone bill.
If you want to know more about the Ovi Store, allaboutsymbian.com have a pretty detailed walkthrough on how to use it on their site.
Source: Ovi Store