I  went off to London last week to the Nokia Ovi Developer Event to see what Nokia big-wigs had to say to their current and potential developers.

I got in midway through the first presentation and was just in time to see Head of GTM Nokia Services, Rupert Englander, talking up some flagship apps, which I felt were a poor showcase of capabilities and understanding of customer expectations:

• ‘Pets Like You’ – take a photo of yourself, upload it, get a pic back of a pet that supposedly looks like you.
• ‘Facebook Birthdays’ – gives you alerts when your FB friends’ b-days are coming up (handy so you know when to ignore this fact because they aren’t really your friends).
• ‘Newton’s Cradle’ – standard show-off toy.

To those who are unaware of what Ovi is, I’ll try and interpret their handy ‘What is Ovi?’ slide. Essentially it’s the term that encompasses all of Nokia’s web services for the user. It’s an evolution of the Nokia PC Suite CD, i.e syncing, sharing etc… But now it’s over the air, and includes Nokia Music, Nokia Maps, the N-Gage service, and the Ovi Store, which allows users to download content such as games, apps, ringtones, wallpapers, themes and other such goodies. There are a few different supported platforms for apps including J2ME, Flash Lite, Widgets, and the native Symbian.

So let’s have some facts and figures:

• The Ovi Store will cater for 100 different devices, covering 180 different countries.
• There are 5,500 items on the store (however, it was not disclosed how many of these items are in the ‘Personalise’ category, i.e. ringtones / screensavers)
• 500 items are approved a week (so rapidly expanding!)

Unlike the Apple App Store, the Ovi Store will not be the only way apps can be distributed to users, there are still the previously existing means such as pre-loaded on device, through network operators and aggregators.

We then had Benjamin Roszczewski, Business Development Manager offering to take some questions from the audience and that’s when the real fun started. “Q&A is a joke, a farce, ridiculous…” was shouted out without hesitation. Nokia’s response was that was why they were having this event, to hear the problems, but another audience member followed up with “but these problems have existed for a year”. So there was disgruntlement, and Nokia were pretty much acknowledging that there were lots of issues that needed to be looked into. Other worries from developers were the signing process and the poor searching facilities which were giving their apps no visibility.

One of Nokia’s excuses was that, unlike “other certain application stores”, they were trying to cater for over a hundred devices, which was a reasonable point but seemed sad that they had to say it.

After a (decent and free) lunch, we heard from some developers who had had success in the ‘Calling All Innovators UK’ scheme, which gave prizes to the best apps on the store. These were much better than the previous ones we had seen and included:

• Touchnote’s postcard service which allows you to create and send postcards with your own photo from your phone. An interesting point on this was their way around billing. There are no micro-payments in Ovi apps yet, so they made a workaround which was giving away the main app for free with 1 free postcard, then delivering other apps which were just 1,2 or 5-card ‘packs’ which, when downloaded, spoke to the main app and incremented your postcard count.
• Mippin‘s series of branded magazine apps including Men’s Health, NME and New York Times.
• BlueSkyNorth‘s ‘Florin’, a very polished looking finance manager which was aimed at the not-so-finance-savvy everyday user.

So, it was a useful insight and overview of what’s going on with Ovi, and I’ll finish with a fact, and the fact I will finish with is a Finnish Fact: ‘Ovi’ means ‘door’ in Finnish.