14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia has been reported about a week ago to plan on launching its own app store, so as to continue the “tradition” started by Apple with the application portal for its iPhone. Other industry players like Research in Motion, Samsung, Google or Microsoft have already announced their similar moves, and now we learn that industry sources have confirmed Nokia's plans to unveil its app store at the Mobile World Congress, only a few days from now in Barcelona, Spain.
The Finnish giant mobile phone maker announced back in December that it would come up with its own application portal, although no specific time frame was unveiled. There are not too many details about the app store available this time either, but Symbian users can rejoice already since they won't have too much to wait until the portal comes live.
The mobile content market has seen a great boost during the past two years, especially after Google and Apple entered the mobile phone market. Given this situation, it doesn't come as a surprise that forecasts point towards the fact that the market of mobile content (downloadable games, ringtones, wallpapers, video, mobile TV, text alerts and mobile web browsing) is expected to see an 18 percent growth this year.
Apple's App Store has opened new doors to mobile content developers to provide a wide range of users with their products, and became really fast very popular among them. “Apple has proved that what the mobile industry has been missing is the supermarket,” said Eric Klein, vice president for marketing of Java at Sun Microsystems. “The tremendous success of Apple's App Store has underlined the importance of this distribution channel,” stated CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood.
App stores are expected to become even more popular this year, and they should also be one of the main topics at next week's mobile show.