Nokia’s Ovi Store is growing quickly, with over 6,000 apps and more coming in every day. We already know that the average selling price of Ovi Store apps is less than Apple’s App Store, which is awesome, but now there are two new reasons to hit up the Ovi Store on your Symbian-powered smartphone.
Today, Nokia announced that the official Skype client is now available through the Ovi Store, free to download. The new Skype client for Symbian, which we covered earlier, includes tons of great features such as support for text and voice chat, file transfer, and more. It doesn’t support video chatting as of right now, but it’s likely that’ll come with a future update, since pretty much all of Nokia’s Symbian-powered smartphones come with a front-facing camera.
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Qik also announced an awesome deal, exclusively available on the Ovi Store yesterday -- Qik Premium. This is the first offering of a premium service from Qik and it offers users more powerful abilities, with the promise for more to be added soon. Qik Premium includes the ability to download your videos from the service, so you can back them up on your local computer, edit them, or do whatever you want with them. You also get a new high-definition encoding option, to upload better videos to the service from your Symbian-powered smartphone. You’ll also be first in line for new premium features coming later this year, such as the ability to upload videos taken with your phone’s native video camera application (in case you don’t have a connection, for instance. Qik Premium is offered exclusively on the Ovi Store for $4.99/year, and this special promotional price is only available through March 31, 2010, so don’t wait to scoot on over.
Bill Perry from the Ovi Store also released some stats yesterday, to give us an idea of just how fast the Nokia Ovi Store is really growing. Apparently, they’re up to 22 downloads every second -- that’s 1.5 million downloads a day, every day. Also interesting is that, on average, each registered Ovi Store user has downloaded 12 items from the Ovi Store. More than 60 different Symbian-powered smartphones are supported by the Ovi Store, and the most popular phones are the touchscreen ones like the N97 and 5800 XpressMusic.
Have you been using the Ovi Store yourself? What’s your experience been like?