Today Nokia have announced Ovi, their new internet services brand. Apparently Ovi is Finnish for “The Door”. At the moment, the site is fairly empty, but lists the currently announced areas that it will cover, namely photos, maps, a music store and their reworked version of the N-Gage gaming platform.
With the N-Gage, rather than releasing “gaming” mobiles as they have to hilarious ends in the past, they are now setting it up as a software platform, initially for the N-series of their mobiles (I suspect they will try and get it onto all of them in time). The big change though is that they are going to mimic the Xbox Live system, have downloadable demos of all their games, have online play, and a gamerscore system. All of which can only help improve things for mobile gamers.
There are also promises of more to come in terms of services. It is planned to launch fully in Q4 of 2007, however some of the services in Ovi (such as maps) can be downloaded now, and some may well go into public beta beforehand. So if you’re a Nokia user, it may be worthwhile registering to see what happens over the next few months.