Nokia offers Arabised version of Ovi Store

Nokia has announced full Arabic support for its Ovi Store across all existing platforms. Consumers whose devices are set to Arabic user interface will automatically view the Ovi Store in Arabic when entering.

“Arabic is the third most spoken language in the world with more than 300 million native speakers,” said Tom Farrell, GM, Nokia Lower Gulf. “We are very excited to now offer these consumers access to Nokia’s Ovi Store on a broad range of Nokia smartphones and mobile devices in their mother tongue.”

The majority of Arabic speaking consumers are located in the Middle East and Africa region where Nokia has seen significant growth in Ovi Store downloads. Primarily Arabic speaking countries account for almost 75 per cent of the overall MEA downloads, with Saudi ranking amongst the world’s top 10 download countries and UAE and Egypt in the top 25 globally.

There are also three local developers from MEA whose applications have each surpassed the one million download mark. One of these is a Java-based application “FunSMS” created by Edumid in Pakistan. Another local success story is AsgaTech from Egypt, which has published a number of apps on Ovi Store, resulting in a cumulative two million downloads to date.

In addition to Arabic support, the latest version of Ovi Store brings enhanced consumer features such as application updates, popularity calculations and web apps for Series 40 devices.

In April Nokia and Etisalat announced that through their ongoing collaboration, consumers across the Middle East were set to be able to purchase content from the Ovi Store with billing directly to their mobile phone account.