Nokia’s Ovi
Wow. Is all I can say after entering Nokia’s hot new portal called Ovi, which I hereby dub World’s Slowest Flash Site.
According to Nokia, Ovi will be the future of the mobile phone experience – combining N-Gage games, Nokia Maps, and the Nokia Music Store in one place. It even has built-in social networking as per the latest Web trends.
It’s nice to see that Nokia is coming out strong in the last quarter of 2007, with some impressive handsets and long-term focus on gaming and music.
The term “ovi” stands for door (in Finnish), and right now it’s very aptly named: the site’s closed until further notice. You can leave your name and email address and get the latest updates on the service; however, Nokia has said that the site won’t be up and running until fourth quarter 2007.
One of the big questions that I have is – can Nokia compete with Apple’s iTunes service? It’ll be an interesting battle, since Nokia will have a pretty seamless integration with its mobile phones, while Apple currently has uh…no integration. But the iTunes store does have a couple years’ head start and a huge brand name.
