Funny business in the Ovi store.

G

Get off the sinking ship!

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I was browsing the Ovi store on my E72 during a lunch break at my new job and noticed some pretty odd stuff.

Nokia seems to be charging for stuff I had picked up for free months ago: things like Furtiv photo share with Facebook and Twitter, Twit S60.

They're also charging money for some truly wacky stuff: $.99 jpeg pictures of celebrities (WTF? Nobody's heard of Google Image? It costs nothing) and get this---they're also charging $2.99 for downloading music videos from the likes of Mariah Carey. You know, the kind of stuff you can watch on YouTube for free.

Seriously, $2.99 for music videos? *Really*, Nokia?

Not sure what's going on over there.
 
Nokia doesn't charge money for anything. All of the apps they supply on the Ovi Store are free. Third party content developers and publishers, on the other hand, are welcome to charge whatever they like and Nokia will oblige them, just as Apple, Microsoft, RIM and Google do. You can charge $10 for your Twitter app like Gravity or $10 for your WiFi hotspot app like Joiku or $3 for your games like Gameloft does and if there is demand at those prices, then why the heck not? A lot of the same stuff is more expensive on Ovi than on the App Store or the Android Marketplace.

I think that what you're seeing is capitalists capitalizing on a burgeoning market. Ovi Store is picking up some serious steam. Ultimately, competitive forces will drive those prices down, not Nokia. If Nokia starts dictating what prices publishers should charge, they're going to take their content elsewhere and Nokia cannot afford that right now.

As for funny business, I'm finding lately that all of Nokia's mobile services have been on the slow side whereas a few weeks ago they were very fast. The e-mail and social gateways and the store primarily. Guess it's time to throw a few more racks into the data center. The performance ebbs and flows of Nokia's mobile services seem to tell a tale of solid growth that Nokia is never prepared to handle. :P
 
Erm, $10 for a Twitter application and $10 for a hotspot feature? I wouldn't call that reasonable.

Android offers wifi hotspot baked into Froyo, and the Marketplace has a ton of free Twitter applications.
 
I didn't say it was reasonable. I said it was at the discretion of the publishers and that they are welcome to charge whatever prices maximize their profits as per basic economic theory. Moreover, I said that it was made possible by early entrance to a nascent market with limited competition at the moment.

Nokia does not set prices for third party publishers and neither does any other market. Competitive forces have driven down prices in the Android Marketplace and on the App Store and they will do the same on the Ovi Store.
 
Also there is a free version of Joiku Spot and there are both free and pay versions of several apps where the free shows ads. Isn't the free Angry Birds version for Android a version with ads?
 
Nokia also hasn't had info straight, either. If Nokia doesn't want you to have an app, you won't see it. I dropped the stupid store. I go looking on other Symbian sites. Forums like this will have recommendations and other places to look.
CS
 
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