GLOBAL – The Ovi Store was launched in May of last year and since then it’s gone from strength to strength, with a number of key events happening this year. Beneath the break we chart its course over 2010, with the milestones its hit and exceeded.
January – The year started with an announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January by Nokia’s Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo that Nokia’s Ovi Mobile email service had attracted more than 5 million users in the first year of operation, beating first-year sign-ups of all the most popular email services like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.
February – Dutch social media app Nimbuzz, became the first app on the Ovi Store to be downloaded a million times, with users in more than 180 countries, but Nimbuzz didn’t hold onto the record for long.
March – In March, the Ovi Store had a makeover and had a whole lot of new features added to it, users could now use the new mobile device selector to see what apps and games were available for their device, and the reviews were enhanced with dates and the phone models used by the reviewer.
April – April saw a triple breakthrough: first SMS Preview from publisher Numo soared past the 1 million downloads marker, Digital Chocolate celebrated its success in hitting over 4 million downloads, then Offscreen Technologies announced its suite of games apps – including Level Touch, Bright Light Touch and Labyrinth Lite Touch, – had seen a combined total over 25 million downloads, with users from 210 countries, sampling their games on the Ovi Store.
During April the store was also hitting 1.7 million downloads per day with three out of every four downloads on the store being apps.
June – June saw the launch of the Ovi App Wizard, this simple web-based service allowed anyone to create an Ovi app in just six easy stages and with just a few clicks and ten minutes of your time. The wizard was so easy to use that we created a Nokia Conversations app which you can download from the Store.
September – Nokia World came to London and it was time for another upgrade to the site. The new Symbian app had multitasking added so you could download and install more than one application at a time, the navigation was made easier, and the design was improved.
October – Nokia services now approaching 140 million users worldwide, with 200,000 new users signing up daily and Ovi Store downloads were now topping 2.3 million per day. Additionally by October a staggering 70 developers have each passed 1 million or more downloads on the Ovi Store.
November – In early November, the number of Ovi Store downloads reached three million a day (now 3.5 million). More than 250,000 new users sign up for Ovi every day, joining 165 million people in virtually every country worldwide who already experience Nokia services.
December – It’s your chance to vote for the App of the Year, you have until the 31 December 2010 to post your vote on the Ovi Daily app site – just click on the “Awards” tab at the top of the page to view the nominees and cast your vote. One individual that correctly picks all six of the winning apps this year will win a new Nokia N8; and that device will be loaded with the six winning applications.