This blog entry is mainly about Nokia’s Ovi store. Loosely this is an App store like Apple’s, but it promises to be availble to 300m devices by 2012.

This is big. I am a big fan of apple, but iPhone sales are dwarfed by sales of Nokias. In my opinion Apple is still way ahead in terms of the phone design and useability, but Nokia (and everyone else with varying degrees of success) are all trying to copy; and as Motorola found out, you can’t just make one awesome phone (the V3) and then sit back and bask.

What does Ovi have?

• A general app store that gives developers 70% of sales revenue (like Apple) accross 15 set price points, and charges though the carriers (after the carriers take their share (which is SHIT – carriers take 40% to 50% – there won’t be anything left!), or through credit card. Apple is way ahead in this respect, and Nokia will have to come up with some more solutions – things like Paypal will help, but one thing Nokia hasn’t got that Apple has is the billing relationship. And that matters. Alot.
• Nokia music store does pretty much the same thing as iTunes, and also streams from your PC. It also has a recommendation engine which is good, but it isn’t as cool as Apple’s iTunes Genius (neither of which are as good as last.fm)
• Nokia Friend view, which actually pits Nokia against Google (their new Lattitude service). I think that Google has a better chance, as their solution goes accross all platforms wheras Nokia’s is only availlable on S60 handsets at the moment. They both look cool though – check out the videos here.
• MOSH which is Nokia’s UGC thing which I won’t go into here.
• A games capability which Nokia will be ahead of Apple for; due to their experience with the N Gage. That said, Apple is more Wii (because of the accelarometer) and NGage is more Playstation, and I prefer Wii over Playstation. Steve Jobs doesn’t really like gaming either, so he may be missing a trick here. Games outsold DVDs this year. 

Distribution

• iTunes has between 100m and 250m users depending on who you ask, iPhone has tens of millions
• Nokia say that Ovi will be on 300m devices by 2012. This is bullish, but Nokia do have 40% of the global market, and there are more than 4bn connections out there (or thereabouts), and 40% of that is 1.6Bn!
• Something else to remember is that iPhone users use their devices way more than Nokia users do – even the new Nokia devices… we will wait and see what Nokia produces to answer the iPhone. I haven’t seen anything close yet (from anyone – confirmed by our guys Nic and Simon who are at 3GSM  in Barcalona at the moment)

Can Nokia get it on the handsets?

All the new ones yes – the first one is the N97 in May, but they say that they will be able to get it on the Series 40 and 60. Through an ‘on handset’ application. Getting people to download that is by no means easy.

Also remember that Nokia will start to piss the carriers off as they will theorise that they will lose revenue (the credit card part). Who knows they may gain more (i.e. their share of the carrier charged downloads), but they will fight over it – which should be fun to watch!  The carriers need to invest in this stuff too otherwise they will become dumb pipes, which they need to either accept, or do something about. And it has to be something more impressive than Nokia and Apple, and Google can do. And that is a very tall order…

So will Nokia win?

Even considering that Nokia has just laid off a load of their R&D guys due to the recession (Not a good time to need to innovate and develop cool stuff) in summary: If Nokia can connect effectively with their handsets: i.e. all the lower end handsets download the application OR all new Nokias pre load Ovi AND they sort their billing out, AND the carriers don’t kill them, THEN they will have the biggest network in the world. Even if they do this – Apple will still be there, they won’t go away because they are too cool and they do things right and their design is beautiful.

But while Apple is “cooler” than Nokia. it isn’t by that much…. Finnish people never hurt anyone, so Maito on calista, Sokeri on Halpa to you!