Nokia Ovi Store coming to Samsung and LG handsets

MWC 2009: All S60 to be included

View more images

17 February 2009 2:20 GMT / By Stuart Miles

The newly announced Nokia Ovi Store will be available on all S60 and S40 handsets, including models Nokia doesn't make Pocket-lint has learnt.

The new store, launched on Monday at Mobile World Congress, will allow users to download new applications on their phone from five key areas such as games, maps, music, and messaging.

The news will mean some Samsung and LG handset owners, like those with the 8-megapixel 8510i, will be able to download the newly announced Ovi Store to their handsets come May, even though they don't own a Nokia phone.

"It will be very hard to stop this from happening", a spokesman for the Symbian Foundation told Pocket-lint at the Mobile World Congress. "It is possible, but we suspect there would be plenty of backlash if they [Samsung and LG] did".

From talking with Nokia, it is clear that the company hopes other manufacturers who use the Symbian S60 operating system will be happy to overlook that Nokia makes competing handsets and allow it to offer services to their customers.

"It could work as a plus for Samsung and LG", our man from the Symbian Foundation told us. "As they could use the store to pull in new customers as they already do with applications from Google for example".

However Nokia's stranglehold on the app market for Symbian handsets might be short lived.

The Symbian Foundation has confirmed that when the first handsets running the new open source OS eventually land in 2010, there will be an "App Area" in the OS where theoretically multiple app stores could exist.

"We couldn't only have one app store where we take money from paid apps as we are a non-profit organisation", the foundation confirmed.

The Symbian Foundation is expected to release its new OS, which will be the equivalent of S60 6th edition to developers and manufacturers, at the end of April. It is expected that manufacturers will announce new handsets with the new open source OS in 2010.

We will keep you posted.