That's not quite fair (services which don't work AT ALL? ) or accurate.

The Ovi BRAND was announced in late 2007, but none of its services were available then. It was purely an announcement of how Nokia wanted to develop in the coming years. There was no actual product attached to the announcement, it was just about the brand and the company's future.

Ovi as a single unified service is still mid-launch, it's still in the phase of bringing together many different elements which were launched indpendently.

The reason it's taking a long time is because Nokia are having to integrate a lot of baggage from many different services that were conceived totally separately, often in totally separate companies which Nokia didn't even own at the time. Google took just as long to integrate e.g. YouTube into its system for similar reasons.

The components of Ovi are:

Ovi Share - Renamed version of Twango.com which Nokia purchased, which carried on after purchase as basically the old site with its old accounts system. The unification with Nokia's accounts system (i.e. becoming a proper part of Ovi) only happened in the middle of last year.

Nokia/Ovi Maps - Originally an independent navigation software company called Gate 5, Nokia purchased it and used it in a standalone service based on data from Navteq (which Nokia also purchased some time ago, but they only got the purchase cleared by competition authorities last year).

Nokia Music - Originally a standalone music store.

Ovi Files - First made-for-ovi service, launched last year.

Ovi Sync (contacts and calendar online syncing service) - Another made-for-ovi service, launched late last year.

N-Gage - A standalone gaming service for Nokia smartphones, it has never been integrated into Ovi at all and perhaps it will just be rolled into Ovi Store (which is what is happening to MOSH, Download and Software Market).

Ovi Store - Made-for-ovi content download service, but hasn't launched yet (launching very very soon though).

Ovi Mail - On-phone e-mail service intended for developing countries and those with cheaper phones, but anyone can sign up if they want to. The webmail client is in very early public beta testing (mail.ovi.com).

Ovi as a single service is just being born now, basically. You've got to give it time to exist as an integrated service before judging its success.

The N97 is probably one of the first phones to be designed with Ovi in mind, so this is something of a first step into the mobile world for Ovi.



The upcoming Omnia HD uses the same Symbian S60 5th Edition platform but with OMAP3 hardware.

OTOH the Omnia HD lacks a hardware keyboard, and of course Nokia's online services won't be on it either.