![evo_bold_promo[1]](http://www.oviapplications.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/evo_bold_promo1.png "evo_bold_promo[1]")
After the impressive Fissure & Shi themes, Tehk from Tehkseven Studios has been working on his next featured theme, Evo. We have got hold of the Evo (Bold) version for you. This theme should be available for purchase from their website in a few days time.
Read the full story for the screenshots to catch the theme in all its glory!
One of the features which should have set the Ovi Store apart from the other stores is the inclusion of Personalisation content such as Themes, Wallpapers & Ringtones along with Audio & Video content in the store itself. But what the people behind the store don’t seem to be understanding is that merely adding support or making provision for such content is not enough. They need to make it easier for artists & developers to get their content published and made available at the store. At present, the high cost of getting the content published to the store is the biggest barrier stopping the artists from getting their theme published to the store.
Starting today, we shall highlight a theme every week at our site. The theme could be a premium theme or even a free theme, but all the themes will be worth having on your phone.
The first theme to get highlighted is a premium theme by tehkSeven Studios called Fissure.
Read on for more details & screenshots.
There is a fascinating 11 page article by Mark Borden about Nokia in the latest issue of FastCompany magazine. Nokia’s EVP Tero Ojanpera is on the cover of the magazine and the article focuses on Nokia’s plans moving forward and the way they want to challenge what Ojanpera calls “that fruit company in Cupertino”. I strongly suggest that you read the article yourself but here are some interesting points:
Again, this is an interesting article and made me appreciate what Nokia has done to mobile industry. We always talk about how Apple is kicking Nokia’s behind but as the article suggests there are two sides to each story and Nokia might be the only company that can scale and make a comeback as a media company.
According to Nokia sources, they are now approving over 100 apps a day so we are starting to see series of new and interesting apps appear at the Ovi store. Here are some of the latest apps on Ovi store.
Touchnote – Utilities – $9.99 for 5 Pack
This is by far one of the most interesting apps in the store. Touchnote which just this past week was declared the best Mobile app service at the MobileBeat 2009 conference, lets you capture a moment on your camera phone and send it as a physical greeting card to anywhere in the world.
I Parked Here – City Guides/Maps – $ 2.99
This is another app that uses the location-based technology to help you remember where you parked. The app uses cell connections instead of the GPS systems and guides you to the car by turn by turn navigation and set up parking meter alarms.
Compass Touch – City Guides/Maps – Free
Simple but very useful app that turns your phone to a compass and gives you direction in degrees and longitude and latitude coordinates.
Battery Extender – Utilities – 14 day Trial / $14.99
Another great app from the makers of Tweets60 , that extends the battery performance of smart phones by fine tuning the settings on your device.
Motion Board – Games – $4.99
This is a great looking game that uses the phones accelerometer and challenges your body balance and handling techniques.
One of the trends that we are noticing this year is the availability of more Location-Based Services (LBS) and applications. Using mobile devices, these applications leverage a users physical location to know where you/ and your friends are and use this data to provide enhanced services and experiences. We’ve also seen Internet giants such as Google enter into this market with Google Latitude and help fuel innovation across the board.
Luckily Nokia’s S60 and Series 40 platform includes a wide range of features to help developers and content producers make rich LBS applications and services. In this post, I am going to profile several of these apps that are available to download from the Ovi store.
Nulaz mission is clear: “What is happening around you”- With Nulaz you can see where your friends are, share locations, and view local info. Nulaz also enables you to share this information with other social network (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc).
This is another location based social network and city guide that keeps track of local information in real time and helps you connect with people, events and places around you.
PhoneLocator native S60 realtime GPS tracking application for Nokia S60 phones. It allows you to view the location of your phone and a trail of where it has been using this website.
For $2.99, you can download this City Guide app that helps you search for pretty much anything around you. With Near Here you can find practical places, your current location and save them in your phone memory for future.
Trackout is a free location based streaming service that enables users to create location oriented groups, network with friends and share location tagged data.
Looking at other mobile app platforms Ovi store has a lot more grounds to cover when it comes to LBS but this is one area that Nokia is very familiar with. Remember they made an acqusition of Berlin based Plazes last year which has evolved into Nokia Maps. With Plazes and other recent acquisitions (Twango, Loudeye, etc) Nokia is in a great position to connect people through location-based services, maps, music communities and gaming services.
If you know me in real life then you know that I am a numbers type of guy and I love to play around with pie charts and excel spreadsheets and create metrics. So one of the things that I would like to do moving forward is to create store metrics and add interesting stats about the Ovi store. This is not an easy task considering that Nokia does not release any store figure regularly but I have some ideas about how to generate these reports and we will see if I can pull it off in the coming days. If there are some metrics that you would like to see, let me know and I will see if I can get them.
For now the only information that I can gather from the store is the application category distribution. Below is a chart of all the top level categories according to Nokia ( Applications, Games, Audio & Video and Personalisation) and the number of applications currently active in each. If this chart is any indication, there is a huge opportunity for developers to create apps in business, music and sports related categories.
NOTE: The Ovi web portal only shows the apps specific to your handset so therefore this chart was created for all apps available for Nokia N97. I also did not include the sub-categories ( total of 10 ) for Games category.
This chart will be updated on monthly basis.
World Traveler by Psiloc is a recently launched traveling application that aims to ” make business traveler’s life easier”. This is another hot space that we are seeing many application developers are trying to tap into and it all makes sense because while traveling many frequent travelers rely on their smart phones for flight info, weather and other data.
Installation:
The World Traveler comes pre-installed on Nokia N97 but other symbian s60 device owners can install this Free application directly from the Ovi store or from Psiloc’s web portal. The installation file is around 1.2 MB and it was very easy to download and install it via Wi-Fi connection.
