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Return of the app store: Nokia discusses Ovi 2.0

In a recent interview with Mobile Entertainment, George Linardos, vice president of product and media at Nokia, is quoted as saying that the original Ovi store was never meant to compete with the likes of the Apple app store, it was designed to consolidate Nokia’s existing services. It’s an incredibly candid interview that not only highlights an understanding from Nokia that it needs to do better in the app store space, it also exposes the future of Ovi – a brand new Ovi 2.0 platform.

“All the while there’s been this new platform being built in the background, which we’ll be talking about in the next couple of months and launching in the Spring with what we’re [internally] calling 2.0,” Linardos says. “It will take us to the level of scalability that will make us highly competitive… It’s being built from scratch with a few legacy components, which will be phased out over the course of 2.1 and 2.2. So it’ll probably be about 75% from scratch, and three or four months after that it will be 100%.”

So there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth, Nokia is building a brand new platform from scratch. As the Mobile Entertainment article points out though, the current Ovi store still needs to be fixed and developers still need to be enticed into it. Linardos finishes the interview by saying that the “game” isn’t over yet and that this is an “inflection point” – we agree. Apps are going mainstream and Nokia is in a good position to create something amazing, let’s just hope Ovi 2.0 delivers what we’ve been waiting for.

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