Nokia Ovi Store launching this May

It was long rumored that Nokia would soon launch a cloud service of its own, providing storage and synchronization facilities for Nokia phones along with a whole range of free and paid apps to choose from. At the Mobile World Congress today, the prophecy came true as Nokia officially announced the Ovi Store in their presentation at Barcelona.

Nokia may be far behind in launching the service but it sure did dive head first into the competition with some intuitive features. Nokia plans to unite the services offered under its Ovi platform into an online store service which would include Applications, Games, Music, Maps and most importantly Widgets.

Some features are already functional like the Ovi Music Store and the N-Gage gaming service along with Nokia Maps, but the heart and soul of the new platform would be the App Store putting Ovi in direct competition with Apple's App Store.

What came as a surprise was the fact that Ovi would not only be limited to the Series 60 platform. Rather it would be available as a download on a number of Series 40 devices starting in May. The first Nokia handset to feature Ovi pre-installed would be the flagship N97.