Nokia has started rolling out its much-anticipated online software and content store, Ovi Store, as it aims to follow the success of Apple's App Store.
Nokia said it had started moving Ovi Store to production servers, preparing for the global commercial launch, and the store was opened to users of a few of its phone models in Australia and Singapore last night.
Nokia has promised to open the store globally this week.
To cope with slowing phone demand Nokia is building a new business from mobile Internet services - like games or maps - but is scaling back separate investment plans due to the slowdown, and focusing on merging the delivery of services.
Nokia, which made its first ever quarterly pretax loss in January-March, is cutting annual costs at its key handset unit alone by more than €700 million to counter plunging demand.
The Apple App Store has proved extremely popular, with one billion applications downloaded in less than a year, and operators and technology firms including Vodafone Nokia, and Microsoft now want a piece of the pie.
However, analysts say firms will likely struggle to match the success of Apple's store when creating their own stores, hampered by technical issues, a lack of applications and increased competition.
After Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, handset vendor rivals all focused their efforts on building similar, sleek devices with large touch screens - a situation that is being repeated in 2009 in the rush to build a rival App Store.
Research firm Strategy Analytics has forecast the value of the mobile content market - including downloadable games, ringtones, wallpapers, video, mobile TV, text alerts and mobile web browsing - to grow 15 per cent this year to $62 billion.
Reuters