Nokia’s Ovi Store celebrates spring with new features and enhancements

Hi, I’m Tiina, and I am part of the Ovi Store team.

It is great having you guys and gals on our diverse and large Ovi Store community which has over 5 million downloads every day. A little over a year ago, we were serving 1 million download every day.  One of the reasons for the 400% growth is that we have been diligently listening and responding to your feedback. Thank you for your continuous feedback! To that end, I am very excited to announce that we are rolling out some new features and enhancements which have been high on our users’ wish lists. What better time to do this than spring, when everything in nature is growing and renewing?

Application Updates – One of the most common feature requests was for Application Updates.  We are pleased to be launching this for Symbian^3 users with the latest release of Ovi Store.  Here’s how it works:

After updating to Store 2.8, when you launch the Store client and sign-in, it automatically checks if any of your downloaded apps have an update available.  If there are updates, you will see a green flag in the corner of your screen by your “Account” tab.  Touch that, and it will take you to your account page where you can see the count and a full list of applications that have a newer version available.  Selecting “Updates” will then give you the option to update individual applications or to update “All” at once.   This feature is initially available to Ovi Store mobile client users on Symbian^3; we will be bringing this feature to new web properties and operating systems, like Series 40, in the near future.

Improved Discovery - We have further optimized our algorithm for the top free and best seller lists to make discovery even more relevant to your interests, your location, and your device. Specifically, we have made the calculation of what is “top” or “best” much more precise by country and by device.  For instance, if a game is wildly popular and heavily used on an E72 device, it will not affect the rankings on an N8 device if the game is not also equally popular.  The same applies for country-based variation ensuring that strong local interest, say in China or India, in an application or game is not negatively influenced by popular titles in other markets or regions.  This will result in more relevant content selections and rankings, and in many cases, help you to find local apps relevant to you with less time spent searching or browsing.  easier.  This feature is available across all device families, and our web and mobile sites.

Related Items – If you like to browse the Store from your computer, we’re also excited to enhance your experience with a new Related Items feature.    So now, when you are on an app’s detail page, like this:

we’ve added a section called, “People who bought this also bought…”  so you can get smarter recommendations. In those cases where an app is too new or doesn’t have enough data, you may not see this feature.  But it should be visible when there is enough information to give you a solid recommendation.  This feature is initially available on the store.ovi.com web site and will soon roll out to our mobile website and mobile clients.

Arabic Translation – Users in Arabic-speaking countries make up a significant part of Ovi Store’s user base.  Back in January, we launched Arabic for our friends with S40 phones.  We’re very pleased today to tell you that the roll out has gone smoothly, and  today we have added this language localization for those using S60 phones. After you install the update, it should show up based on the default languages settings of your phone. Symbian^3 and Series 40 device clients are already localized to Arabic in the Store thanks to an earlier release.

There are also many more minor enhancements in this release to improve the overall Store experience.

So lets us know what you think when you get to use these!  These new features will be rolling out over the next few days, so may take a few days to show up on your phone. We hope that they make your experience shopping for the world’s best games and apps even more enjoyable.