“This was supposed to be a glorious day for mobile phone giant Nokia. The Finnish company got out-innovated by Apple a couple of years ago with the introduction and subsequent success of the iPhone and the iTunes App Store, and has been desperately trying to catch up with Cupertino’s disruptive initiatives ever since by launching a couple of new devices on one hand, and consolidating its software & services business on the other hand,” Robin Wauters reports for TechCrunch.
“Today sees the worldwide roll-out of Nokia’s Ovi Store, the company’s response to Apple’s App Store (and other centralized content stores for mobile phones and OS’es), and no doubt the company is watching the launch unfold on a global scale with watchful eyes. Here’s the thing: the launch is an utter disaster and I assume (hope) Nokia executives are outraged with the way things are going,” Wauters reports.
“I’ve been trying to browse the selection of apps to select 10 that users should download to start off. I found that the store was down most of the time I was trying to snoop around, pages often didn’t load, and if they did they nearly always did extremely slowly,” Wauters reports. “It gets worse. Out of the ten applications I recommended earlier today, three suddenly disappeared from the Ovi Store for no obvious reason.”
Wauters reports, “The user experience sucks too. Navigating the online store is downright complicated, and the categories being assigned to certain applications and content are way off at times.”
Full article here.
John Paczkowski reports for AllThingsD, “The Ovi Store, Nokia’s much anticipated response to the wildly popular Apple App Store, debuted this morning–ignominiously by most accounts. Early criticisms point out the store’s paltry selection, slow performance and sign-in errors, disappearing apps and a less-than-intuitive UI.”
“Certainly, it makes for a poor comparison to Apple’s App Store, which has already shown up an industry of which it wasn’t even a member a few years ago,” Paczkowski reports. “As Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecom consultant Northstream, said when Ovi was first announced, ‘As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it’s a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry. Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that’s never done it before.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you can’t even follow the program that Apple has clearly laid out for you, then you just plain suck. (See: Microsoft.)
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Wingsy” and “Jersey_Trader” for the heads up.]
