Ovi – Nokia’s Own App Store
If you’re looking at buying any new Nokia smartphone you’ll be wanting to load it up with some really cool games and apps. To that end Nokia has introduced their Ovi Store 
and N-Gage gaming services.
Ovi is Nokia’s answer to the App Store for Apple and, well, everyone’s mobile platform app store these days. They just did some major updates to it but it’s still got some flaws. It’s also an online storage area for your photos, music, contacts, mail and more, but that’s a different article.
Most noticeable is when you want more information about an application on the website. Clicking the app’s icon makes you choose your phone (which I had already tied to my account I thought). Once I did choose my Nokia N97 Mini, the app I was interested in disappeared. Apparently, it’s not designed for my phone. After the second time the site did manage to remember my choice.So I started to browse the store after that and it’s OK. There are some decent apps but many which you can find free, on say the iPhone App Store, have pay versions here. Also, I put the store in list mode so I could read more about each app instead of just an icon and extremely short description. It seems that there’s some flaw in the site so when you click next, it leaves you at the bottom of the page instead of resetting to the top. Not a big deal really since I can browse either up or down, just a note about the navigation.
Surfing through the free apps brought some interesting results. There are some pretty nifty things in there like compasses, phone trackers, instant messengers, SMS previewers and Wi-Fi finders. But the service only allows you to send 5 SMS to your phone in a day. So after that I then had to stop surfing the store on the PC and do it on the phone. Why it
Surfing the store on the phone isn’t all that bad really, but having to stop in the middle of what I was doing and switch to it was cumbersome and annoying. In regards to sorting you search listings, there’s no sorting by price. You can list free or paid or both but you can’t then sort them by price which means if there are several apps that suit your needs, you need to surf through the whole list to find the best value.
So cruising around the Ovi Store on the phone I realized, it just automatically installs applications to the phone’s memory and generally doesn’t give an option of where to install it. Well, that is going to fill up fast so I started looking for a memory manager on the phone and couldn’t find one. Nor could I find a way to move applications from one memory to another. So back to the Ovi store it was to search for an app to do that and… there is none. The only way to move apps is to delete them and reinstall them when given an option to do so on the Mass memory instead of the phone memory. Not all apps will give you that option when you install them either.
At least the iPhone is smart enough to just use all of its memory. Of course its memory is not expandable like the N97 Mini’s is. But even then, wouldn’t you think there were a mandatory “where to install” option?
The applications on the Ovi store are similar to what’s available on the other stores and include free apps like Facebook, Skype, YouTube, news aggregators and readers, and odd things like magic eight balls, touch snow globes and other fairly useless things. Of course, these are ubiquitous now and there’s so much junk available you could fill your memory in a day without breaking a sweat.
There are also pay applications available that can be had on other systems for free. For example a PDF reader. I have a free app on my iPhone that reads Office documents and PDFs, yet the pre-installed PDF reader on the Nokia is a 15-day trial and then you have to pay for it… strange when you can get Adobe reader free for most browsers. On top of that it’s like $12.50 (the same price as QuickOffice on Ovi)! QuickOffice for the iPhone is cheaper and allows you to read Office docs as well as PDFs.
The Ovi store sort of reminds me of a rummage sale, you know what I mean, people trying to sell junk that doesn’t really have a lot of value. That’s not to say there aren’t some good apps on it. But the majority seem like they are overpriced or just useless aimed at wasting time, eating memory and not serving any real purpose. For example an app called “FartControl” is in the Top Seller list, it’s a motion-sensing whoopie cushion. The fact that it’s in the top sellers list on Ovi concerns me. Who exactly is buying it that it reached the top seller list? Along with that are also Fart Attack, Smell Scanner, and various other apps of that nature. Apparently Nokia users have a thing about flatulence.
Apps also seem to be extremely highly priced. For example a Czech-English dictionary costs $27. I could just go get a physical pocket dictionary for half that and be done with it. The really bizarre thing is that you can get free dictionaries right from Nokia so I don’t quite understand it.
Games on the other hand vary widely in price from free to $6 for Premium Sensible Sudoku. I know what you’re thinking about that, $6 for Sudoku is ridiculous and honestly, I have to agree. But those are the ‘non-premium’ titles. I was told some time ago that N-Gage would remain the main premium gaming service for Nokia and Ovi would be the, other games. Checking the prices on N-Gage I found the games are mostly about £6.00 (I’m using the UK service). But I found that they have an interesting feature which lets you buy the game for one day at £1.50. Now I don’t know that I would do that when there’s a free trial available. It seems like a waste of money altogether. The games that you find on the N-Gage service are recognizable names like Tomb Raider, The Sims, Spore, Tiger Woods, Prince of Persia, etc. While the games on Ovi are more generic, clones of more recognizable names (like Tetris) and lots of ports of Flash-based casual games.
Overall, the Ovi store is a mixed bag. The apps seems to have little rhyme or reason to their pricing and things that are free on other mobile platforms have pay versions here. But there are ample worthwhile free apps that will keep you occupied for some time while they sort out all of the other issues, hopefully. Some of my favorites are SMS preview, Opera Mini and the cool Compass Touch from Offscreen Technologies.