Edible Apple

Nokia rolled out its Ovi Store earlier today, but things got off to a less than auspicious beginning.  If you recall, the Ovi Store is a mobile app store for Nokia devices, and Nokia is hoping to position it as a competitor to the already up and running, and wildly successful, iTunes App Store.  Of course, that’s easier in theory than in practice.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Early criticisms point out the store’s paltry selection, slow performance and sign-in errors, disappearing appsand a less-than-intuitive UI. Nokia blamed the store’s unresponsiveness on unusually high traffic and did its best to address the problem, but even those efforts by its own admission resulted in only “intermittent performance improvements.”

Yikes. 

One of the downsides to the Ovi Store is that there’s no desktop client to facilitate the perusal of apps.  All app browsing and purchasing must be done on the phone itself, an activity which might end up being too much of a nuisance for users.  Even on a large mobile screen, navigating through a listing of thousands of apps necessarily requires a lot more work and investigative legwork.  The ability to scan and purchase apps wirelessly from your phone is a great feature, but if that’s the only avenue to purchase apps, then the user experience is that much more worse because of it.