Erictric

Nokia To Hold Press Event Thursday With ‘Big News’ Expected

While it’s true that Nokia devices have had their fifteen minutes of fame in the good old USA, the brand remains extremely popular elsewhere in the world — particularly Europe. Therefore, you could say that Nokia fans have something to look forward to this upcoming Thursday.

Nokia will be holding a special press event to most likely show off a new-and-improved Ovi Store at the Paramount Club in London on January 21st, 2010. Executive Vice President of Nokia Anssi Vanjoki along with Nokia UK General Manager Mark Loughran are expected to lead the event at 9:30AM sharp. Whether or not this qualifies as “big news” is up for you to decide.

Now, we wait.

[ via Engadget ]

A Nokia developer’s view of the Ovi Store

The Nokia Ovi Store has been taking some heat lately, mostly based on its premature debut to the world. Some are even criticizing it simply because they are not accustomed to it, or because it isn’t the Apple App Store. Little do we realize, however, that those who develop for the Ovi Store are struggling as a result of Nokia’s decisions. Erictric had the opportunity to find out what the challenges were of developing for the Ovi Store, through an exclusive piece written by Ed Hodges, Head of Mobile for the U.K. based Touchnote application (an application which allows people to take a photo on their mobile phones, include a message and the recipient’s address and send to Touchnote over WiFi or mobile data connection.  From there, Touchnote will then create a physical greeting card and put it into the post to be delivered in the UK on the next working day). More »

Nokia Ovi Store: Epic Fail

Yesterday, we posted about the debut of the Nokia Ovi Store later this week. Today was that day, the global launch. There’s only one problem – it barely works. The site comes up really, really slow. It took me roughly five minutes just to bring up the home page. Now I know what you’re thinking; yes, it’s the first day and they’re getting pounded with traffic (Thanks to the press) – BUT (and that’s a big but), there’s more. Robin Wauters of TechCrunch reports of suddenly disappearing apps, tricky user interface, and the “I can’t log in” phenomena.

The Ovi Team at Nokia put out this statement not long ago (Courtesy: TechCrunch):

“Shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 am ET, we began experiencing extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi. We immediately began to address this issue by adding servers, which resulted in intermittent performance improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused Ovi Store users and encourage you to continue giving us feedback as we develop the service further.

The Ovi Store device client, however, has continued to perform very well and there were no reported issues from users logged on through that entry point

Can anyone else tell Nokia was in a rush to put this out?

You can read the TechCrunch article here.