I was very happy today to see Nokia's Ovi Store launch to the public, and to see a lot of my own content in the store from day one. I think it's a very exciting time to be in mobile development, but particularly for Flash developers, since Ovi represents a huge new opportunity for Flash mobile developers to get their content distributed easily to literally millions of consumers around the world. 

Thought I’d give you a quick snapshot of the purchasing process in Ovi Store on the mobile client as it happened when I purchased Darren Osadchucks’s Poker Solitaire Flash Lite game …

Here’s the general flow when purchasing content on your device, using the operator billing method:

Now a few points to make …

I think the process was pretty smooth and I didn’t encounter any issues or problems at all when purchsing. Given that there are a few more payment options than some other app store experiences (and when I say “other”, you all know who I mean!), there were a lot more clicks required to get to the point where I’ve bought, installed and launched the application I wanted.

Also, once you complete the entire process, you are still in the Ovi client, on the application’s page showing the “Download completed” status bar message, but you still have the option to “Open File”. I thought that this was referring now to the app I had just installed, but it’s actually still referring to the installer. If I click it now, it tried to install it again, rather than launching the already installed application. I restarted the Ovi client just to make sure, and found that it still wanted to launch the installer. I guess I can understand this in that at least it knows you have already bought the app before, and could easily re-install it from here if you needed to. However it might also have been nice to have the ability to launch the actual game from here.

Overall though it was a pretty good experience, and a lot better than previous experiences I’ve had buying content on Nokia devices. I suggest that you always write a review, or rate the content that you’ve bought (good and bad) as it really helps customers to see what content is “active” with other customers, and hopefully if it’s a good rating, will also help to distinguish good content in what will be a pretty crowded marketplace I’m sure as it moves forward.

So off you go - go and buy something and help feed mobile developers and their children!