Went to the Nokia Ovi Store Showcase at Ben & Jerry’s at The Cathay. I always like the fact that Nokia always try new places for their events. Anyway we can order anything on the menu we like in Ben & Jerry’s. Even the S$88 item which contains 20 scoop of ice cream! I only managed to eat 1 scoop and drink 1 cup of smoothies as I was pretty bloated.

The Nokia Ovi Store showcase was to give bloggers a brief on the Ovi Store. Ovi Store supports up to 75 devices (even those 3 years ago models) running S60 or S40 OSes. When you launch the Ovi Store, it will detect your device and will only show applications that are compatible with your devices.

Nokia Ovi Store is not just about applications and games but it also includes Audio (podcast), Video (trailers, clips), Flash channels (screen savers) and Personalization (ringtones, wallpapers).

They also showcase some of the very interesting apps to us, the most interesting one to me was the app eyeSight. If you are in a meeting and forgot to silence your phone which is placed on the table, when the phone rings, just wave your hand above your phone and it will be silent automatically. Cover the earpiece with your hand and once you remove your hand, it will send a pre-configured SMS to the person who called you! Pretty neat application.

The main highlight yesterday was the application buffet! They pass us their Stahub SIM cards, place it in your own Nokia phone and login to your Ovi Store account. Next, you can download ANY paid apps you like for free to your Nokia devices!

There is a Singapore Ovi Store which of course the prices of the apps are listed in SGD and they also allow you to pay by operator billing (Starhub only at the moment). By default if there is no localize Ovi Store in your country, the price listed will be listed in Euros and you are only allowed to pay by credit cards.

I did ask what will happen to N-gage, they say N-gage will still focus on games which are multiplayer based. But I think eventually they will move all the games to Ovi Store.

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