GLOBAL – Ending our week of looking at Nokia’s various blogs we close out with one of the newer members of the clan, the Ovi Blog. With an ever expanding range of services and applications, Ovi is rapidly establishing itself as the “door” to the Internet (Ovi is Finnish for door), providing a wide range of mobile users access to the services and applications on their devices that previously simply weren’t possible. Ovi Mail is possibly one of the best examples of this, where hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom wouldn’t have previously had access to a PC, have already set up and run an email account directly from their mobile device.
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Ovi Store for Nokia N97

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Nokia N97 Facebook video

GLOBAL – Facebook has wrangled its way back into my life (after being usurped by Twitter) simply because of the FB app on my N97. Before I got that, I hadn’t been on the site for a while, and only then to briefly pick up messages. Now I’m on it pretty much every day. I wrote the other day about how simple apps like the Facebook one can bring the phone and service together, and how the integration of the device’s camera functionality in the app made a real difference. Well, with the N97 hitting the streets in London today (and pre-orders aplenty!) I’m sure lots of you will get to see it for yourself. Meanwhile, for those who haven’t yet, we’ve got a neat little video showing the app in action.
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Ovi Store poll results – over half of you already downloading content

GLOBAL – The dust is beginning to settle around the launch of the Ovi Store, with initial reactions to its arrival ranging from magnificent to miffed. So in our recent poll we thought we’d ask you if you were actively downloading content from the Ovi Store, and how much content you’d sucked onto your handset over the first few weeks. Over four hundred of you got involved in the poll, and it turns out over 50 percent of you have already begun fattening up your Nokia phones with content from Ovi Store. Read on for all the results.

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Nokia 3710 fold comes into focus – photo gallery

SINGAPORE – The 3710 fold is Nokia’s latest clamshell camera phone, and arrives on the scene with sharp, speedy and low cost photo-sharing front of mind. When it launches later this year the Nokia 3710 fold will come floating a price tag of around 140 Euros, making this well-dressed 3.2-megapixel 3G handset stand out as a price-savvy, snap-and-share caller.

Click through to get more details on the new Nokia 3710 fold and to see it up close and in detail in our first-look photo gallery.

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Where the phone and the service come together

GLOBAL – The evolution of applications on our devices has been quite rapid. The first step was of course giving the device extra functionality – the ability to watch certain types of video codecs, or view your messages in a different way. Then it got a bit more involved, bringing little bits of the Internet into your device one bit at a time, bringing things like Maps onto your device, along with info sucked from the Internet and combining it with functionality on the device (GPS) to create a whole new experience. Now though, I think we’ve reached a whole new level.
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Industy analysts. Martin Garner (Commvine) & Tony Cripps (Ovum) from Nokia Developer Summit:

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Ovi Store poll: How much content have you downloaded so far?

GLOBAL – Nokia’s new Ovi Store opened its doors for business a couple of days ago, and yesterday we rounded up a bunch of reactions from across the web related to the launch of this milestone download service.

Sure, it’s only little over 48 hours since the lights were switched on at the Ovi Store, but we know many of you are already beginning to dive in and download content. Let us know how you’re getting on, and how much content you’ve downloaded so far.
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Ovi Store launch – the reaction

GLOBAL – “The launch is an utter disaster”. So said Robin Wauters on TechCrunch.com. In contrast, Ewan at Mobile Industry Review ended his launch report with “Good Work Nokia!”. At the risk of sounding biased, I’m going to agree with the latter. Why? Well, let’s look at the stats. 109 countries. Five languages. Fifty handsets. Operator billing in eight countries. A cross-platform service offering a wide range of content. The problem? Not anticipating the speed, volume or numerous locations of users accessing the service.

By yesterday afternoon, many of the initial teething problems were resolved and with servers serving 15 times the traffic they had been in the morning, everything was working just fine. What’s more, the server issues highlighted one key fact – Ovi Store was being accessed by far more people than anyone initially anticipated.

That’s all thanks in part to the speed with which the news spread across the Internet. AllAboutSymbian’s Rafe was one of the first to report the soft launch over the weekend, and has been updating along with colleague Steve ever since (they even rushed out an AllAboutSymbian Insight Podcast which you can listen to here). But that’s just the start with Google News showing in excess of 440 articles written about the launch. Yesterday.