Nokia’s Ovi app Store on N97 soon

Nokia Ovi Store, Nokia’s answer to the iPhone App Store, will go live in June. Nokia announced the Nokia Ovi Store today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Nokia 97, the upcoming smartphone flagship from Nokia, will be the first Nokia phone to come preloaded with the Ovi Store software. The Nokia N97 will be launched in mid-June this year.

Picture: Nokia Ovi app store on the N97 phone

The price of the N-97 is set at 550 euros in Europe, though carriers are free to subsidise the product along with usage contracts. Like the iPhone App Store which is hugely popular with iPhone users for the 15,000 applications and programs available online, Nokia Ovi Store also will feature thousands of applications.

Nokia has set a section called publish.ovistore.com where software developers can upload their applications. The Ovi Store application developers can choose to distribute their ware free or sell it at a price with a revenue sharing arrangement with Nokia, sharing 30% of their revenues with Nokia. The Nokia Ovi Store will be a one-stop shop for media content, software applications, and web services.

The games and utility software can be accesses with a tap on the N97 touchscreen. The Nokia Ovi Store, which will go live in a few months’ time, will host hundreds of ringtones, caller tunes, wall papers, games and other media content. However, music will not be available on the Ovi Store, which will be sold separately on the Nokia Music Store.

The Ovi app store will be available to 50 million users of high-end Nokia phones. Nokia expects a 300-million user base for the Ovi Store in three years. The Ovi Store will also operationalise what Nokia calls the “social location” (SoLo) for mobile phone users. Simply put, this means that if you travel from Mumbai (Bombay) to Delhi with a Nokia N97 accessing Nokia Ovi Store, the N97, enabled with GPS and geolocation, senses your location, and once you reach Delhi, will show you landmarks, restaurants, ATMs etc which are near to you. Utility or intrusion? You decide!

The N97 is pegged as the “most advanced” mobile phone-laptop-computer by Nokia. The N97 will come out with a humungous 32 GB onboard memory, which can be expanded to 48 GB with an SD memory card. This is enough space to store thousands of hours of music and effectively condemn iPod to just a music device.

The Nokia N97 has high-speed HSDPA wireless connectivity which can technically download data at a superfast 7 MBPS. However, HSDPA being a 3G technology, (and India being a slow-coach in 3G adoption) it will not be available for Indian N97 users for quite some time. The high-speed data connectivity is key to fast access to the Nokia’s app store Ovi.

The Nokia N97 will sport a slide-out keyboard, apart from its touchscreen. Initial reviews of the slide-out keypad say that it is much more convenient to use than the slider option in many existing cellphones.
Apart from access to the Ovi Store, the N97 will also come with A-GPS and accelerometer. The touchscreen also has handwriting recognition. The N97 comes with Bluetooth, WiFi, GPRS and EDGE connectivity for fast data access. The FM transmitter, preloaded Nokia Maps and a media player that can render a wide variety of file formats make the Nokia N97 a formidable smartphone. The N97 browser can display Flash too, while the iPhone still cannot.

Nokia claims that the N97 has 430 hours of standby time, with 6 hours and 40 minutes of talk time. The Nokia 97, with the help of its online services, has a feature called Point & Find. This means that if I land up in Hyderabad with the Ovi Store-accessing N97, I get to access information on the Charminar by just pointing my N97 at the tower and clicking a picture with its 5-mega pixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics. Since the N97 already knows I am in Hyderabd, it checks with the web services to find details about the landmark, and send me relevant information about it. However, I won’t vouch for the reliability of any of the geolocation services in India – Once I was travelling in a suburban train and the GPS-Google Maps combo on my BlackBerry showed me that I am in the Arabian Sea.