Nokia's Launches App Store, Open to Everyone

Nokia’s Ovi app store is online and officially accessible by everyone.

Nokia today announced that the company’s brand spanking new app store, previously only available in a handful of countries, is now available globally. Nokia users can check out Ovi by visiting the site via their mobile phone. Those of us who are not using one of the 50 Ovi compatible Nokia devices can poke around the store at Ovi.com.

As you can imagine, high amounts of traffic shortly after Ovi’s global launch meant a ton of users experiencing technical difficulties that included apps disappearing from the store, folks being unable to log on with their credentials, pages not loading and the site freezing. Nokia issued a short statement, apologizing for the inconvenience and assured users that the company was working to fix the issues by adding servers. Full statement from the Finnish company is below (via TechCrunch).

“Shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 am ET, we began experiencing extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi. We immediately began to address this issue by adding servers, which resulted in intermittent performance improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused Ovi Store users and encourage you to continue giving us feedback as we develop the service further.

Are there any Ovi users in our midst? If so, be sure to let us know how you like Ovi and if it’s worth ditching our Blackberrys, iPhones and G1s along with their respective app stores.