Henri Cook

Nokia Nokia Nokia, i’ve been a faithful customer for years but the Ovi store might be the last straw.

I’ve had problems with you spamming my email in an impossible-to-unsubscribe manner, your poor online customer service and you’ve slowly been falling behind as the IPhone has become more and more prominent.

I’ve just logged in to the Ovi store all excited and i’ve come out with one application – SmsPreview, which looks and works great. The website crashed a few times (time outs) before I got it to load, the buttons have no user feedback and aren’t normal html submit buttons so I had no idea when I was actually submitting stuff which lead to a few double-submits and some confusion during signup.

The ‘20,000 apps’ that you’ve launched with are mostly bollocks themes and ring tones (hence me only finding one that’s of any use to me). I can’t believe you’re counting a star trek trailer as an ‘app’ – i’m really disappointed at the trickery. The internet market isn’t stupid – in fact it’s probably the hardest to fool of them all, this is a really bad start for Ovi.

All you needed was a private beta, ask 200 users like me to login and use your store for 30 days. I could have told you the forms were rubbish, it was unclear how to select what phone you have and that having themes as apps was a crap idea. I could also have told you that you need to give users the ability to comment on the apps they download as well as rate them.

I hope this gets better, next month’s going to be a big one for phones and I for one am looking for a new one. The N97 looks nice but I need Ovi to be good and I need Symbian to be a responsive, intuitive, *well tested* operating system unlike it is at the moment with my current N95.