Nokia is holding its big press conference this morning in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, with the blogosphere buzzing with rumours that it's going to launch a new application store, bundling several of its existing services together.

We're liveblogging from the event, so keep refreshing this page to get all the news as it's announced.

10.10am CET: And we're off, with Nokia president and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who kicks off with some spiel about "challenging times", saying the global handset market will contract for the first time this year. But (as you'd expect), he thinks Nokia is well-placed to ride out the tough times.

10.15: Smartphone features are quickly trickling down into cheaper 'feature phones', which will make Nokia's activities on the services side even more important - he mentions the company's latest buzz phrase, "social location".

10.17: The company is big on environmental responsibility - recycling, alerts to remind people to unplug their chargers when done, and so on. The company wants to take a leadership position in this - "It's not the Finnish way, but every so often I like to brag about it," he says, before introducing EVP of devces Kai Oistamo to present some new devices.

10.20: Right, on with the new stuff - two new handsets. Oistamo starts  by talking about the N97 though - "the highest flagship in the entire range of Nokia... what really makes it our flagship is the tight integration of services."

10.21: "The N97 will be in stores in June," he says. "But relying on one hero product is a bit like walking on a razor's edge."

10.22: Okay, a new Nokia Eseries phone - he says Eseries is about "efficiency", not just business. Regular mobile users want access to their email on the go too.

10.24: He's spinning this out a bit. Oh, and now a video of consumers talking about mobile connectivity and their time management. It includes the phrase "work is a state of mind". Try this on your boss.

10.27: So, the new handset is the follow-up to the much-loved E71. "You guys are gonna really like this product," he says. "We looked at every other QWERTY device and smartphone in the world, and then we threw away the rulebook... we were determined to create the world's thinnest smartphone."

10.30: The new phone is the Nokia E55 - with a "compact QWERTY keyboard". Up to a month of standby time - crumbs! - a large display, and a price tag of 265 Euros when it goes on sale this summer.

10.31: I should point out, the compact keyboard involves putting two letters on each key - ER on 1, TY on 2, UI on 3 and so on. Didn't BlackBerry do this a couple of years ago with its SureType keypad layout?

10.32: Another one: "The new N97... no! N95! No... wait, the E75." Oistamo is so excited that he's forgotten the name of the other new handset - that wasn't a joke. But the E75 it is, a phone with a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, shipping with Nokia Messaging on-board.

10.33: Not much games stuff here, but I'm getting it all down anyway - the E75 is "the best email device that Nokia has ever done. Period." It's a bit HTC-like judging by the images on the big screen behind Oistamo. Shipping next month for 375 Euros (unsubsidised).

10.35: Okay, change of presenter now: Niklas Savander, unveiling a "next-generation service". He starts off  by mentioning social location again, as something that's involved in all Nokia's services.

10.37: "Applications are more popular than ever, and research shows that consumers want content that is relevant to their interests, location and people in their lives," he says. "In a way, you could say that applications have gone mainstream." Should we thank iPhone for that?

10.38: "Immediate relevancy" is a new buzzphrase, as far as I know. "The old generation of services is no longer cutting it. They are too complicated, too hard to find, they are not relevant, and to be honest, they are just boring." Nokia wants to make consuming and discovering mobile content "as easy as watching TV" - but not just on smartphones, on low-end devices too.

10.40: "This is not necessarily about the 2% of the population who are already using and trying to get them to switch. It's about the 98% who are not using," he says. Sounds like he's positioning Nokia's efforts as a more mass-market affair than the iPhone to me.

10.41: Ooh, and needs of the operators must be taken into account.

10.42: So, Ovi Store - maps, music, messaging and games. It suggests stuff you might like - a step up from the App Store - and it changes its inventory based on where you are physically, trying to anticipate your needs. "It's a smart store, but it's not just for smartphones" - it works on Series 40 and Series 60 handsets.

10.43: Starts in May, and the N97 will be the first to have it pre-integrated. But there's an addressable base of 50 million handsets that'll be able to download the Ovi Store. "We anticipate a scale of 300 million devices per annum by 2012," he says. It'll roll Nokia Download, MOSH and WidSets into one interface.

10.45: "The service will start to learn your habits and tastes over time, and anticipate what you might want to do..." Says very unlikely that two users would have same content appearing on their store.

10.45: Apps, videos, productivity tools, games... I'm wondering how (or if) N-Gage fits in.

10.46: Publish.ovi.com will let publishers easily publish their content and apps to the Ovi Store. It'll support credit card or operator billing. 70% revenue share - matching the App Store and Android Market. EA is already on board, along with Fox Mobile, Facebook, Shazam, Rough Guides and MySpace.

And that's it. Well, apart from the usual random ragbag of questions. But Ovi Store is big, big news for the mobile games industry, so we'll be chasing down more details on it throughout the week.