14 DAY TRIAL // The launch of application stores for mobile phone users has seen quite a boost during the ongoing year. Following the launch of Apple's App Store for the iPhone, and its increasing popularity, most major players in the telecoms area came up with their own storefronts. Among them, Nokia's Ovi Store is one of the most popular, mainly due to the impressive amount of people that use its mobile phones, but also courtesy of the content offered through the application store, it seems.
[admark=1]The software solutions portal from the world's largest handset maker was launched in May this year, and it seems that it should see a new version being delivered to users sometime in spring next year, at least this is what Nokia said recently at a London event. The store is believed to come with a series of legacy problems, and the new version is mainly meant to eliminate them.
Even so, it is rather interesting to see how the popularity of the application store is rising. According to Nokia, the Ovi Store is currently registering around 1 million downloads each day, and the figure is expected to rise. “We’re doing just under one million downloads a day, and our download numbers are growing 100 percent month-on-month,” is what George Linardos, the company’s VP of Product, Media, said recently, according to Mobile Entertainment.
The Ovi Store, in case some of you might not remember, managed to hit the 10 million downloads mark three months after it has been launched. The upcoming new version of the storefront should also boost growth, as users will enjoy an improved user interface, a faster environment, as well as increased reliability. According to Linardos, the current Ovi Store was only a temporary measure. “All the while there’s been this new platform being built in the background, which we’ll be talking about in the next couple of months and launching in the Spring,” he said.