Nokia apologizes as Ovi Store is swamped on opening

As we reported yesterday, Nokia turned the lights on and the Ovi Store opened for business. The problem was, the virtual store was overwhelmed by potential shoppers and the site slowed down to a crawl. Some users complained that they were unable to download content that they had purchased. The site offers free and paid content divided into categories like games, audio & video, and applications.

With support for five languages, the number of potential visitors to the site is huge and Nokia spokesman Andrew Flowers said that the company had apologized to those who complained about the problems on the store's blog. He also added that more servers have been added to help handle the large volume of browsers visiting the site. One thing that the spokesman would not comment on was whether or not Nokia had dropped the ball by being caught unaware of the potential number of opening day visitors. Flowers commented that in the first 24 hours of being open for businesses, the site was visited by people from 131 different countries.

The Ovi (which is Finnish for 'door') Store is Nokia's attempt to compete with the Apple App Store, Google's Android Market and BlackBerry's App World. 60 Nokia devices now support the site.

source: Yahoo