Better late than never is perhaps the most appropriate phrase for Nokia’s Ovi store. With Apple’s App store recently bagging its billionth download and Blackberry App World starting to gain momentum, Nokia have finally got their App store up and running with the Ovi store now open. Should Apple and co. be concerned by the big N’s offering?

First impressions of the store are good. Setting up an account and logging in is relatively painless; choose your Nokia phone, enter in a few details such as creating a username and password and your account is instantly activated. Once logged in, the Ovi store will take you back to the homepage and show you a selection of recommended applications for your phone, both free and chargeable. From here you can then use the tabs at the top to sort by most recent and also by type (games/ applications/ wallpapers etc.). On each category there is also the option to filter between paid and free apps. The lay out of the Ovi Store is clear and straight forward and navigating is hassle free. Negotiating the different genre’s also makes it easy to filter so you can find what you’re looking for. One negative is the lack of free applications (in games there were only 5 compatible with my N82 and one of these was a demo) but considering the Ovi store is only a few days old, we’re willing to overlook this.

So first impressions are positive for Nokia’s Ovi Store. It goes without saying that they have there work cut out for them following in the foot steps of the hugely succesful (not to mention all round brilliant) iPhone App store but the launch of the Ovi store in the run up to the launch of the N97 is just in the nick of time. Can Nokia build on the good start it has made? Only time will tell…