This month we were looking at the new Nokia N96, a review of which will appear in the next issue of Shopper. We were intrigued to find a link on the Home screen: “Share online”. This takes you to a menu where you can choose a number of online services that allow you to share your content. For the moment, these seem to be limited to Yahoo!’s flickr photo sharing service, the Vox blogging site, and Nokia’s new Ovi.com portal.
Ovi.com (ovi means “door” in Finnish) isn’t as much of a household name as Facebook, but by including a link to it on its phones, Nokia is evidently pushing its adoption as a personal sharing site. It has sections for sharing contacts, maps, multimedia, game data and other files, and launched in August this year. The gaming section is powered by N-Gage, which already has mechanisms for sharing gaming information, while the Files section is powered by technology acquired from Avvenu last year.
It's obviously designed to be a hub for personal information, and driven by content from users' mobile phones. However, the site seems to be a bit slap-dash, with some sections not linking back to the main site, and without a unified interface across each sub-section. This makes it load slowly as well, and there's a distinct lack of integration. A lot of functions are duplicated across sub-sites, such as photo sharing.
It's certainly not the slick, Web 2.0 experience we've come to expect. Nokia will need to put much more effort into it if it hopes to pull users away from established sites, mainly MySpace and Facebook. With such tough competition, Nokia should invest more in the design and functionality of the site, and hope that Web 2.0 doesn't turn into Dotcom Bubble 2.0. If that happens, Nokia better hope the Ovi doesn't hit it in the arse on the way out.
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