Review: Ovi Store (Symbian)

It has been exactly a month since Nokia launched Ovi Store, the Finnish company’s – let’s be honest – answer to the Apple App Store. How does it measure up

One thing is inarguable – Nokia, or Symbian phones in general, needed an organised App Store. The mish-mash of download sites and services that most Symbian users were used to meant no easy way of paying for applications and often no guarantee that what you were downloading was safe.

Apple’ App Store changed all that – setting the bar rather high with a service that is easy to use and tightly integrated with the phone. Love Apple or hate it, the App Store just works.

Ovi Store.. does too. Kind of. Almost all the key elements are in place – it even has a few nice features that Apple lacks but it doesn’t quite gel.This isn’t entriely Nokia’s fault – Apple only has one (two if you count the iPod Touch) platform to worry about. Nokia has many different models with subtle differences in both hardware and software.

Heres what does work: Applications are easy to find. Nokia does an admirable job of only showing you apps that will run on your phone. Apps are presented as large icons (12 to a page) with star ratings. On mouseover, a ’speech bubble’ popup will appear detailing price, a brief descrition and a ‘Send to mobile’ button.

The service will recommend apps it thinks you may like, and you can do the same with a ’send to friend’ button. Clicking on an app will give more details, reviews (and the chance to add your own views) and ‘related apps’ that perform similar functions.

Here is what doesn’t work so well: everything else. Actually buying an app is, for me at least, tortuous. Clicking the ’send to phone’ button will send an SMS to your phone (the number being part of your account details) containing a link… to the Ovi store. Yes, clicking that link on your phone takes you to the same page that you were on on your PC – this time, however, you get a ‘Download’ button. Unfortunately, to actually use the Download button you need to sign in to Ovi Store again using your phone’s built-in browser.

The built-in Nokia browser may be many things – but ‘usable’, ‘intuitive’ and ‘any good at all’ are not among them. The browser’s seeming inability to remember login details between sessions means you have to laboriously sign in again each time you decide to buy an app. Once you are in and can click ‘Download’ you will either simply get your free/trial app via wifi or 3G or you will have to negotiate the card payment system to purchse you non-free app.

The card payments work, but – again – entering the details via the keypad is an almighty faff. You can of cousre simply do this once and have Ovi Store remember them for you. One niggle I had was with th echouce of payment options. VBISA, AmEx.. but no Mastercard or debit cards. Even Paypal would have been nice. Sort it out, please, Nokia.

What is a simple two-taps and a password option on the App Store is for some reason vastly more complicated via Ovi Store. Focusing the purchasing of apps on the phone seems like a misstep when your phones are as fiddly to operate as Nokia’s (N97, 5800 etc. excepted – but not all customers will have those yet) Also, why no option to just download the SIS file and side-load the app? Frustrating.

Does the Ovi Store measure up to the App Store? No.

It is, however, a step in the right direction and much better than the jumble of alternate sources that faced Symbian owners in the past. Nokia has a somewhat harder task before it than Apple, and supporting multiple platforms on multiple mobile carriers can not be easy. All the same, there is much work to be done and several rather dim choices that need to be unmade before the Ovi Store can be declared an unqualified success.

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