I guess the top management in Nokia never use OVI service otherwise they would have fired the project managers and outsourced it already.

So far with 113 votes, 93% of people don't think Ovi Store is good.

Smart phones these days are pretty much defined by the availability of applications, and by extension app stores that are easy to use. If a company can't get their app store right, and Ovi Store is NOT right and getting it right is proving something of a major challenge for Nokia considering all the false starts, then it seriously undermines the devices and the developers that hope to make them a success.

It's difficult to know what to say about Ovi Store and Nokia - it's such a mess, and both are rapidly becoming irrelevant.

The applications are expensive! You can have a similiar application at one-tenth of the cost with Iphone.

The Ovi store support sucks. They can provide you only with idiotic suggestions.

The worst thing is they rob my money!
My recent application download was unsuccessful with an error message "purchase session has expired". No download link has been sent to me. However, Nokia still charge me for the application. And they have refused to refund.

If you use the username you can re-download the app as many times as you want for free without re-purchasing..the downloads and purchases are tied to the username, not the device.

Anyway, Ovi Store should learn from Microsoft's XBOX LIVE market service. Both the local and web versions.

It's fine for me and I don't think that should be taken to mean it's not good. It's just fine. Which is good.
No problems with finding apps, no payment issues and no download issues. I'm happy waiting for new apps to arrive (Angry Birds level packs to name but one) and having been a Linux user for some years, I've learned to be patient.
Of course, I would like to see more apps for my N900 but, at the same time, I'm happy that it doesn't have over 200,000 apps and counting because 98% of what's available on Apple's App Store is either pointless, useless or irrelevant to me. The same goes for the Android store, too.
That said, I've never owned a Nokia before and am a little bemused to find that the Nokia support experience isn't living up to my somewhat high expectations.
I'll lower them in future...

But I love my N900.

I've had an Android 2.1 phone for the last few days ago, and while there's no chance of it replacing my N900 as my primary device the one stand out feature of the device is the ease with which I can find and install applications from the Android Marketplace app. The app loads quickly, searching is super quick, apps download and install in the background.

Compare and contrast with Ovi Store which is cludgy and slow, searching is random, and the App Manager is just a disaster as it simply does not scale - I have to wait two to three minutes for App Manager to get on with the download and install, and it does these each and every app - 10 apps, half an hour of time wasted (on Android, no such delays). The fact Ovi has to use App Manager to install rather than installing silently in the background makes the experience worse than it needs to be.

There's really not much else I like about Android 2.1 compared with Maemo5 - the selection of Android apps is obviously greater but the biggest win for Android is the usability of the app store.

@Milhouse: and what would you say to those who think that the browser is the single class of apps really required on any connected devices? Any other apps are cruft/framework of limitations?

To expand on my previous point, one of my favorite things is choosing all the demos and games to download on the xbox.com website, and then the next time I turn on the 360 it downloads all of them in the background.

I think it's something everyone should do if it's not done so already. I think iTunes does something similar, but can you do it without using iTunes? For example, a web-only interface.

On Maemo, the browser (MicroB, Opera Mobile, Firefox) are definitely better than Android, without a doubt. I've only got a Pulse Mini (£99 from T-Mobile PAYG) with a 2.8" 320x240 touch screen so the browsing experience would hardly be a pleasure whatever browser was installed!

eMail (since I use Google Mail for my email) is better on Android - for some reason Modest has slowed to a snails pace on my N900, it's as though the database is full of cr@p that isn't being cleared out correctly. Modest is probably the biggest disappointment of the N900 considering how much development effort seems to go into it with so few results. App Manager on the other hand hasn't changed much (apart from the cosmetics) since it was introduced on the 770.

In terms of Android vs Maemo in all other respects, it does feel like Maemo is for grown-ups and Android for kids - I'd agree with Nokias positioning that Maemo is for mobile computers and Symbian is for Smartphones (and thus competing with Android), Android really does feel like a phone OS with computer aspirations while Maemo is a computer OS with phone capabilities added on.

But this isn't about Android vs. Maemo, it's about Ovi and App stores. On that score, Android wins hands down with Maemo far, far behind.

No paypal else i would have paid for some things assuming ofcoarse its not down or telling me my device isn't supported when I do make a sacrifice to visit.