Nokia Dropping “Ovi” Branding This Summer.

Nokia’s revamped Ovi brand which brought together the likes of their old discontinued N-Gage services, Nokia Music, Nokia Maps, and many other Nokia-branded apps/services will very soon be no more. The company has announced that they are officially dropping the “Ovi” branding and instead reorganizing under one name — Nokia. The move comes after nearly three years of heavy marketing and most likely million upon million of Euros invested in a service that overall attracted few.

Per Nokia Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Jerri DeVard:

We have made the decision to change our service branding from Ovi to Nokia. By centralizing our services identity under one brand, not two, we will reinforce the powerful master brand of Nokia and unify our brand architecture – while continuing to deliver compelling opportunities and experiences for partners and consumers alike. The reasons for this decision includes the fact that Nokia is a well-known and highly-loved brand the world over. Our mobile experiences are tightly integrated with our devices – there is no longer a differentiation. For example, if consumers want the best mobile navigation experience, they know it’s a Nokia that they can rely on. These last few years, and moving forward, our mission remains unchanged: we will continue our work to deliver compelling, unified mobile service offerings and next-generation, disruptive technologies.

It makes sense for Nokia to get their ducks in a row considering the continuing loss of market share the company is experiencing. Though as for their own branded services, it’s not really known how relevant they’ll be (or whether people will even want them) now that Microsoft has taken the reigns and features their own suite of more popular and used services. In short: Nokia-branded services look to follow the same path as Ovi, N-Gage, and others before it — irrelevance which results in death.

The change in naming and marketing is scheduled to begin in July of this year and continue through 2012 with no planned outages in any one service.

Swype Now Available for N8. Still Lacks Portrait-Oriented QWERTY Keyboard. #swype

Some good news and bad news. First, the good — Swype is now available for the Nokia N8 smartphone. The bad — it’s still landscape only. Granted, this is more of a Symbian OS shortcoming and not in any way Swype’s fault. Though Nokia users should still find the updated keyboard leaps and bounds better than the stock software keyboard, which is arguably nothing but garbage.

Special care needs to be taken if you’ve been running the Nokia C7 specific build of Swype on your N8 as you’ll need to completely — Completely! — remove it from your phone before installing the N8 version. If you don’t, all kinds of bad things will happen, kittens will die, and trees will whither. Ok, maybe not that extreme. But you get the picture — it could get nasty.

Swype for the Nokia N8 is now live in the Ovi App Store free of charge. Let us know how it goes.

Ouch: < 6% of Ovi users actually use Music Store.

It’s awesome when consumer electronics companies reach out to their user base and ask them their opinion on their product. It’s not awesome when one of your staple products — in this case, Ovi Music — comes across as a blatant failure. The survey conducted by Nokia asked it’s users what their must used services were. Not too surprisingly, Maps was the biggest at 35%, followed by the Ovi Store at 26% and Nokia Messaging at 10%. After that, it dips down into the single digits.

As far as the Ovi Music Store goes, I’d say it’s not doing so hot despite the claims of Nokia themselves. When one of your biggest bragging points for your existence fails to garner more than a 6% user uptake, you’re doing something wrong. Then again, you have to look at the typical Nokia user and ask if such a service is really even that important to them. You know — different market, different requirements.

Any Nokia users care to weigh in?

Maemo + Moblin = MeeGo

Talk about a short lifespan — Nokia’s next gen mobile OS, Maemo, was effectively killed today at MWC with the announcement that the companies very own Maemo and Intel’s Moblin would be joining forces and emerge as a completely separate entity dubbed “Meego”. According to Nokia, Meego won’t just be for phones, but for pretty much “anything with a processor on board”. Hmm, the whole Android creep into every device just got a worthy competitor. Interesting

As we’ve all come to realize since the release of the iPhone and App Store, a mobile platform must have a good assortment of apps if it is to survive. For Meego, the Ovi Store will be the go-to standard for mobile apps and most everything else. The only oddity is that the developers actually building applications for Meego will use Intel’s App Center — why the split? Beats me. The fragmentation from the get-go however isn’t the wisest decision I’ve seen.

For those worried about Maemo compatibility: “the next release of Maemo will be 100% compatibile with MeeGo. So Maemo has become MeeGo but will still be separate, developers use Intel’s App Center and consumers download said apps with Nokia’s Ovi Store…Is anyone getting confused yet? I only ask because the name for the next version of Maemo is still undecided — “Maemo 6 or Meego something”?

Why branch Maemo off? Thoughts?

IntoMobile

Ovi Maps breaks cover. Goes eye to eye with Android/Google Maps

Ever since Google released the free Google Navigation for Android 2.0 devices, the tech world at large has been pretty fixated on how cheap (duh) and robust the service is. For $0, nothing else really comes close. Nokia would like to remind you however that they are still very much in the game.

Today at a Nokia press conference, not only did the Nokia Exec’s present make mention of how Ovi Maps is better than the rest, they even went as far as to claim it’s hands down better than Android and Google Maps/Navigation. Pretty bold wouldn’t you say?

They base their claims on the fact that Ovi Maps uses both a cell signal and preloaded map data to make using Ovi Maps a much smoother and faster experience. On non-3G phones or 3G phones outside of 3G coverage, Google’s offering (along with pretty much any other mobile map/navigation software that relies on cell signal) relies on a cell connection to constantly update (read: download lots of data) the application.

So is it actually better? We’ll have to reserve that judgement until we get some hands on time. As one would expect form such a large global brand, a full 180 countries will be able to use Ovi Maps in the coming weeks spanning across 46 languages. However, if you’re looking to get all lippy with Ovi Maps, at this point and time only 74 countries will gain said feature.

If you’ve got a Nokia N97 mini, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia 5800 Navigation Edition, Nokia E52, Nokia E55, Nokia E72, Nokia 5230, Nokia 6710 Navigator, Nokia 6730 classic, or Nokia X6, count yourself lucky as you’re part of the elite few (for now) who can use Ovi Maps.

So Nokia users, how’s it lookin’?

LaptopMag

Nokia N900 finally blessed with Ovi Store access/downloads.

Oh joyous day. The Nokia N900, by far the most exciting and lust worthy Nokia device currently on the market can now finally boast about Ovi Store support. Until now, the Maemo 5 powered device was exempt due to incompatibilities with the Linux based OS. A new firmware update has corrected that problem however. With all the talk around Apple’s App Store overshadowing pretty much everything else, news such as this doesn’t usually make it’s way to the top of the pile. That’s where we — the tech obsessed nerds who live in their computers — do for a living. Enjoy.

Gizmodo > Nokia Conversations

Nokia’s “Ovi” hits a snag in Brazil.

Ah the classic story of two companies battling it out over naming rights. Today’s match up has Nokia with their “Ovi” mobile store pitted against Brazil and their ringtone/SMS news alert service dubbed “Ouvi”. Off the bat it’s worth noting that both Ovi and Ouvi are pronounced exactly the same. Nokia does have the deeper pockets as the company currently known as “Ouvi” is much smaller and therefore has less cavernous pockets. However, team Ouvi does have some legal weight on their side. The most notable aspect of Ouvi’s case is the fact that the registered the domain name “ovi.com.br” way back in 2004. So, who do you think will win. The deep pocketed Finnish favorite or the legally sound underdog?

IntoMobile > Reuters

Image Source

Nokia’s “Personal Media Network” (Ovi) to be launched globally within a month

The app store race is getting another contender in supposedly a months time.  According to Nokia executives, Ovi will be not only an “App Store” but an “entertainment channel” as it will also include audio and video making Ovi a one stop shop for all of your mobile needs.  So far the cut between Nokia and devs will be the popular 30/70 split respectively.  However, they didn’t rule out other percentages as everything isn’t quite set in stone yet.  So far Ovi has had “thousands of applications submitted from over 40 countries” give the new Nokia store a good varying selection at launch.  Of course, apps will be fitered by country and carrier for certain items.  All in all the Ovi store appears as if it will be a legitimate contender in the app store race.  Hopefully when it launches we can see some truly new, innovative, and exciting things from them.

Source: Crunch Gear, Financial Times

Nokia’s Ovi App Store joins the app store party

Announced at MWC, Nokia’s Ovi application store is the latest manufacturer based app store to join the party.  The Nokia N97 will be the first Nokia handset that will have access to Ovi, however, “ton of S40 and S60 customers can start the downloading mayhem in May”.  Cool beans!  Nokia is open to ideas and change and is looking to the Ovi users for feedback.  As customers’ choices for apps change over time, so will Ovi.  The 70% developer share that Apple started seems to be a good number as Ovi will be giving 70% of revenue developers while keeping the rest in house.  Not a bad deal at all.  So Nokia faithfuls.  You’re day of downloading happiness is soon coming.  Are you excited yet?

Source: Engadget