Nokia, the Ovi Store and a lack of vision

Tomorrow, I hope to get a Nokia N97 to test for a while (I've briefly looked at it before).

Nokia is spending a fair sum promoting and advertising this touchscreen smartphone. What interests me is why it is not spending the same effort on building up and promoting its Ovi Store.

Ovi Store? What's that?

Well may you ask. It's Nokia's online application store -- its version of the iPhone's App Store. So far, it has less than 10,000 applications on it. Apple has 65,000 (and growing at breakneck speed).

What Nokia doesn't seem to get (fully) is that the App Store is now THE reason why a significant number of people plump for the pricey, network-restricted iPhone. It's not the megapixel count.

I've been banging on about this for some time. I'm wondering when Nokia is going to treat the Ovi Store like the absolute priority that it should be (ie more important than any individual handset launch).

Comments

[Emmet Ryan]

Couldn't agree more Adrian. The App store is as big a selling point as the shiny-shiny factor for the iPhone.