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Ovi is more than catching on, it’s racking up some considerable figures, Nokia announced Oct. 1. Part of the Ovi environment, the Ovi Store now facilitates 2.3 million downloads per day, Nokia shared, and more than 200,000 people are additionally signing up each day for Ovi – which ties the Store apps to mapping information, contacts and e-mail.
Nokia’s answer to the Apple App store, the Ovi Store opened in late May 2009.
“With a generation of amazing devices, like the Nokia N8, developers are looking at Ovi as a good business decision and a chance to innovate and create next-generation mobile experiences for our family of new Symbian smartphones,” Tero Ojanpera???, executive vice president of Nokia Services, said in the statement.
Ojanper???’s comment – and the announcement that more than 70 developers and publishers have now surpassed the 1 million downloads mark for their Ovi Store content – comes as Nokia has begun shipping the N8, its newest flagship smartphone and a device that it hopes will reverse its fortunes in the high-end device market, which is currently dominated by Android-running smartphones and the Apple iPhone.
The N8 is the first Nokia handset to run the Symbian 3 operating system, and additionally comes with the Qt software development environment – a hopeful lure for developers, as it enables them to create an application once and deploy it across a number of software platforms. More than a perk, such a capability seems critical to attracting strong numbers of developers, as Symbian, currently the world’s leading OS, is beginning to lose both industry support and market share to the newer Android.
The Nokia statement additionally arrived on a day when Samsung – following the lead of Sony Ericsson, just days earlier – announced it will discontinue support for the Symbian platform, come year’s end. In addition to its Bada OS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, Samsung is a major supporter of Android, which analysts expect to be a rising star, as support for Symbian dims.
For now, however, Nokia is certainly entitled to its bragging rights.
Enhancements to the Qt Software Development Kit have resulted in a “70 percent reduction in the number of lines of code required when developing for the company’s family of Symbian smartphones,” Nokia shared in its statement. Which is good news for developers around the world.
In China, India and Indonesia, 4.7 million users have subscribed to agricultural, educational and entertainment services in Ovi Life Tools. And in Brazil, Mexico, India, Finland and South America, Nokia is the largest single source of digital downloaded music revenue.
“At Nokia, we believe that connecting people with great mobile experiences is at the heart of what Ovi is all about,” said Ojanper???.
An updated Ovi Store experience will be debuting on the N8 and later arriving on a full range of Symbian smartphones.