your missing the point:

a) you don't need an ovi-account to talk to people on their mobiles. Nokia Chat is XMPP-based, so just use whatever jabber-account you have and add them to your roster. The people who use their mobiles do need an ovi-account though, because Nokia doesn't allow them to use the accounts they already have.

b) the reason why this doesn't work is that nobody i know is willing to add my new ovi-account to their roasters. (well, almost nobody.) they already added me, so why do it a 2nd time? this, of course, makes using my ovi-account less fun because i don't get presence information. it would just work without any problems if nokia alllowed me to connect to any jabber server with the Nokia Chat software on my phone.