Disregarding the mass of criticism heaped upon Ovi Store since launch, Nokia has hinted that it might open the service to other platforms in the medium term. While Ovi Store is exclusive to Nokia devices today, the company's head of software, service and Go-To-Market, Rupert Englander, has indicated that opening Ovi to other manufacturers is under consideration.
However, Englander stressed that presently the company was focused very much on providing users with a ‘great experience' when using the app store, and no timescales were being put on any expansion of the service outside of Nokia handsets.
Englander also revealed plans for a host of new Ovi applications. "There are some exciting applications arriving early next year from the developer community, who use our core mapping infrastructure and web through Ovi to provide context enriched applications." He added that this was part of Nokia's strategy to transform itself into a services provider and increase the number of users to 300 million by 2012. "We have some interim targets that are well on track to hit this year."
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