Nokia Ovi Store is live today

Nokia has announced that its new Ovi Store mobile app store is live this morning, and accessible by more than 50 of the company's handsets.

Offering a catalogue of games, applications, videos and podcasts, the store is available as a WAP site, and also as a downloadable client.

It can be accessed by pointing your phone's browser to store.ovi.com, or through the Nokia Download app on supported phones.

The website is live too, and lets you search for apps and games by handset model.

As an example, there are 187 games available for the N95 8GB, and 129 for the 5800 XpressMusic. Using the option to search for 'Any Phone' reveals a total of 257 games.

A quick browse has led to us spotting games by Digital Chocolate, PopCap, Gameloft, I-play, Glu Mobile, Namco Bandai and EA Mobile, among others. £4 seems to be a common price.

Operator billing is supported in eight countries: Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the UK. Credit card billing is supported everywhere else.

Alongside the launch, Nokia has announced that US operator AT&T will launch Ovi Store to its subscribers later this year.

UPDATE: There appear to be a few early teething problems. When we visited the Ovi Store WAP site from our N81, we were invited to download the application, only to be told it was "no longer available":



Half an hour later, and the same URL is going straight to the WAP version of the store, without giving the option to download the application.

Hopefully it'll be fixed and live later today. Visiting the Ovi Store site from our 5310 Comes With Music phone, meanwhile, simply displayed a one-word Sorry message.

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