Nokia Changes Ovi to Nokia

Bye bye, Ovi. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. Nokia has killed the Ovi brand, although not the services and app store it once represented. They’ll now be called “Nokia Services”.

On the Ovi blog, editor Pino Bonetti trotted out the party line (as penned no doubt by Nokia’s brand agency) that “The main reason for this change is so we can leverage the high-value of the Nokia master brand to better support future plans to deliver disruptive and compelling mobile experiences globally.”

One could be callow an ask why this was not the case when the services were first introduced in 2009, but no matter.

Ovi (Finnish for “door”) has grown into a pretty decent app store and services offering, unfortunately badly compromised by an incredibly spotty start (TechCrunch calling it “a complete disaster“), where the Website was down more often than up, and the app store’s shelves were mostly empty, despite a large and vibrant developer community pumping legions of great apps into the Symbian stores, including independents like GetJar and Symbian-Guru). Ovi was also tainted by the hopelessly confusing bait-and-switch “Comes With Music” offering, and bits and pieces started falling off pretty quickly (with the last major casualty being the Ovi Files cloud storage service late last year).

Nokia is very insistent that it’s just a brand name change, and the downloads, apps and music will continue to flow as before, and that users will not be affected in any way. There is plenty of industry speculation, however, that the remains of Ovi Music Unlimited (already shuttered in 27 countries), will be shoved aside to make way for Microsoft’s Zune music service as Nokia shifts to Windows Phone 7. What happens with the apps and games is anyone’s guess.

The Ovi website has no mention of the change of name, and the rebrand will probably be casually slipped in while no-one is noticing. Because no-one cares.