Nokia quietly launched its fully integrated Ovi services site, combining its filesharing, photo, music and gaming services. A new service in Ovi Sync was also unveiled.

The site offers photo and file uploads for free, with the minor caveat of a 100MB filesize cap. Features include a separate desktop application, public and private channels and nifty extras such as blog ticker tape widgets.

Other Ovi attractions are the Nokia Music Store, access to games for Nokia’s N-Gage platform and access to third-party sites like Flickr. A new feature is Ovi Sync which allows users to sync their phone calendars with an online version on Ovi. All these features are accessible under a unified ‘dashboard’ of sorts.

One shortcoming is the non-unified sign-ons. If a user has a Share on Ovi account, the same login credentials cannot be used for Ovi Sync. Instead, the user must re-register to use Ovi Sync instead of just carrying over the Share on Ovi account.

What’s the big deal about Ovi? Ovi started off as the new name for Nokia’s newly acquired media site, Twango. But out of Twango’s ashes, came not just a site but an entire platform. It’s likely Nokia’s ambitious attempt into making a name in the Internet services arena, muscling in on territory claimed by Google and Microsoft.

Is there space for another big player? With the failure of Yahoo’s ambitious Mash, Ovi seems like a risky concept. But where Ovi differentiates itself is its integration with the next Internet frontier – the mobile phone.

Of course Ovi’s offerings are geared towards mobile phones made by Nokia or at least running its Symbian OS. With a market share that’s huge in Europe and Asia, Nokia’s cleverly tapping into a huge potential market for mobile content.

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Entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 2:47 pm under Cell phones, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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