The shortcut to learning a new city. Get City explorer for door-to-door GPS pedestrian navigation in over 60 countries on Ovi Maps for mobile. See 3D landmarks and detailed descriptions of stuff to do, places to eat, and shows to see from Lonely Planet, Michelin and WCities. Plus weather forecasts wherever you go.
City explorer may be preinstalled on your Nokia already. Check your mobile
The store, called the Orange App Shop, will offer access to 5,000 applications, games, ringtones and wallpapers and was announced today in Paris at Le Web 2009.
It will be rolled out across Spain, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Slovakia, Belgium, Austria, Moldova and Portugal next year, with Orange promising localised content where relevant.
The service will initially be available "over the air" to more than one million customers in the UK and France, but forthcoming handsets, including the Nokia 6700 and Sony Ericsson W995, will be preloaded with direct access to the App Shop from January 2010. Orange plans to roll the service out to other devices, such as those from Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola and BlackBerrys, in the coming months.
The shop will be built into the homescreen allowing one click access to the apps. Orange TV, Orange Games and Orange Maps will all be present within the store and anything in the shop can be downloaded and purchased on one Orange mobile bill so customers do not need to preregister and use credit cards.
Yves Tyrode, executive vice-president of Orange Technocentre, said: “We are giving customers a tailor-made shop window on the mobile that makes it easier to discover, download, use and manage content. Whether it’s a smartphone user, or someone using a simpler device, we know the demand for content is there – it’s just about getting that experience right.
"That is why we want to give everyone with a phone in their hand the easiest access to personal content, on the most suitable device and tariff, to help them take the parts of the mobile internet that they know and love, everywhere they go.”
Orange has confirmed that it is working with developers to make sure applications for the shop are compatible with the Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Java and Windows Mobile platforms.
However, there was no mention of the store selling iPhone apps from Apple, despite Orange now being a network provider for the iPhone in the UK.
A word to the wise – if you are planning on launching a shopping list mobile app with social functions, you might want to pick a short and snappy domain name for your website which will, after all, be the hub of your service. Yes, makers of Shoppy, we are looking at you with your ridiculous URL. Find out whether Shoppy is worth downloading from the Nokia Ovi Store with out Shoppy app review…
Despite this rather glaring schoolboy error we rather like Shoppy. It is a simple idea – a mobile list app that lets you input items and quantities either on the web or on your phone.
Presentation is top notch, with pleasingly clear type and a well chosen colour scheme on the ‘list of lists’ front page and a cute ring-notebook effect for the actual lists themselves. It doesn’t add any fuctionality to the app, but it does make it a little more pleasant to use.
You can create multiple lists, each containing as many items as you like. Items are added in ‘Edit’ mode and are categorised (Food, Fruit & veg, clothing, etc.) with a catch-all ‘other’ category for anything out of the ordinary. In practice, these categories don’t do very much and you can sort or search by them, which is a shame.
In ‘Shop’ mode, your lists have a check box next to each item. Tapping the box marks it with a nice Tick and both greys out and draws a line through the item. Weirdly, although you can specify a quantity of an item when creating your list, there is no facility to only buy some of the quantity that you need. If you need 12 cabbages then you can either say you have bought all 12 or that you have bought none, which does render the quantity feature a bit pointless.
Sadly, this kind of carelessness does occur throughout the app – ‘veggies’ is misspelt as ‘veegies’ and we encountered more than a couple of ’script errors’ that meant we had to reenter list items. The web interface suffers from a similar lack of testing and wobbly coding.
Despite this we did warm to the app. It is useful as far as it goes and the ability to share lists with others is genuinely useful – as is the ability for you to go out shopping while your other half updates your shopping list from their PC as ideas occur to them. With a bit of polish (and a more memorable URL) Shoppy could be a real winner.
Molinker, which has made more than 1,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, including city guides and camera software, has been accused of "gaming" the review system to give its software higher ratings and more positive feedback than it might otherwise have received.
The anomaly first came to light on the iPhoneography blog, when one editor noticed that around 90 per cent of the reviews for Molinker's apps were written by users who only reviewed Molinker's apps. The iPhoneography blog estimated that as many as 42 of the 44 five-star reviews for one app, NightCam Pro, appeared to be fake.
iPhoneography accumulated a dossier of possible infringements by the app developer, and sent its findings to Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing, who is also closely involved with the App Store's running.
Initially, the blog did not receive a response, but noticed that all 1,011 applications developed by Molinker had been deleted from the App Store. Phil Schiller later emailed the blog team to confirm that the apps had been removed and the developer's ratings "no longer appear either".
There are around 100,000 applications available from Apple's app store, and the deletion of Molinker's app catalogue represents a sizeable chunk of the software and programs available on the site.
Apple has taken a tough stance against other developers suspected of working the review system to their advantage. In August, it pulled around 900 apps developed by Perfect Acumen after accuses the company's chief executive, Khalid Shaikh, of copyright infringement and intellectual property infringement.
