There aren’t a lot of Nokia users left in the United States, which is kind of a shame–partly their fault and partly the fault of philistines.

Nokia makes unparalleled hardware. I have an E71 and it’s sleek, has all the functionality of BlackBerry, and ever feature one could want on a QWERTY phone. It’s professional grade, and I love it.

But taking a look at iPhone’s app store, I realize my E71 is not nearly as cool as the iPhone. Sure, the battery lasts for two days, even if I’m running multiple programs and hooked up to 3.5G, I get email pushed instantly to my inbox without additional rates, and the GPS has saved my bacon numerous times. But I want to be able to shake it and find a restaurant!

Those old jokes about iPhone apps are, well, old now. There are just too many wonderful free and low-price iPhone apps that it’s almost foolish not to at least consider getting an iPhone. The thought of emailing or texting on that joke of a keyboard is not appetizing (yes, I know many of you like it just fine but I have an iPod Touch and I seriously can’t type more than five letters without getting an error. It’s not you, it’s me).

But today, Nokia has announced their Ovi store, which is a direct assault on iPhone. There will be an app store and it will be big, since worldwide, Nokia is a rather dominant phone maker. As the press release says:

Offering a range of content including applications, games, videos, widgets, podcasts, location-based applications and personalised content, Ovi Store will be available on S60 and Series 40 devices. The first device to include the mobile storefront on board will be the Nokia N97, set to launch in June. Meanwhile tens of millions of existing S60 and Series 40 devices will be able to take advantage of the store from May. Ovi Store is unique in its ability to target content based on where you are, when you’re there, why you are where you are and who else has downloaded similar content.

Well, I’m looking forward to it. While my E71 does a lot of things well, it would be nice to have some more attractive apps.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 11:04 pmand is filed under Uncategorized, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.