having the billing go though the provider

they dont have to chase bills and payments and the providers will push their store all the much more to their customers.

and it's not working well at the minute, it does have a nice interace though. Perhaps server load.

Ovi has been bubbling along in an almost working state for some time. Only the vast investment in it has driven any need to actually go live (officially, my account was set up last august!!).

Its flakey and it not integrated with itself, let alone anything else.

Nokia had a great name and i have no doubt still has great engineers but sadly they lost their way a long time ago... too much indecision, n-gage or not to n-gage... no wait, we'll miss the market opportunity and then sit on our hands for a while so someone else can beat us to it then we'll make a half arsed attempt....

Yep that sounds like Ovi aswell... (wait for Apple to do it right, then offer a half arsed alternative).

Now i think about it, comes with headaches was there too... big corps = slow to do ANYTHING

I'm having the same server load issues, but thats to be expected for a day or so i suppose. Just downloaded a nerdy version of nokia ringtone to try it out, seems to be pretty straight forward

It's slow, and is full of useless crap

I must be completely dense, but I can't see any applications here at all?

Was pleased to find my N80 on the list of supported phones... but likewise no applications!

Also there appears to be no native app for the phone. The link on Download! just redirects to the really awful mobi site. Not only poorly designed but slow to use as well.

Ovi Store is critical to the release of the N97 and it's looking like a disaster at this stage.