I have just spent four days in Barcelona at MWC catching up on the industry developments. The main topic on everyone's lips was The App Store, and by "The" App Store I mean Apple's, not Nokia's OVI offering or any of the other contenders.

Let's take a little look at OVI. Nokia claim that there is an initial market of 50 million handsets. I disagree. Unless Carphone Warehouse go out onto the high street and start pulling people into their store and upgrading their phones for them, the vast majority of smart phone users are not going to install the OVI software. There are two reasons. Firstly, the entire motivation for an App Store on device is that users are not prepared to go through the pain of downloading software and installing it. So why, exactly, are they going to download software (OVI) and install it? Secondly, developing applications for S60¹ is simply a lot harder than developing them for iPhone, and takes more time. Moreover, those applications need to be tested on the entire range of OVI devices. So the applications either need to cost more (for the same number of sales), or have a wider market (which they haven't got). With over 10 million iPhones out there, all with an active user population downloading and buying applications, Nokia need a very substantial uptake of their S60 handsets just to get applications shipping at anywhere near the same price level.

It isn't going to happen. You read it here first.

Tomorrow - why I think that OVI beats the App Store!