Nokia's VS Apple The Battle

With one billion applications downloaded in less than a year, the Apple App Store has proved extremely popular. It is now the turn of operators and technology firms such as Vodafone Nokia, and Microsoft who have geared up to battle for a piece of the pie.

Nokia has opened the store to users of a few of its phone models in Australia and Singapore on Monday. Nokia said it had started moving 'Ovi Store' to production servers, preparing for the global commercial launch.

However, analysts say firms will likely struggle to match the success of Apple's store when creating their own stores, hampered by technical issues, a lack of applications and increased competition.

"Nokia's Ovi store is a step in the right direction but Apple is still the king of the hill when it comes to selling applications," said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight.

Nokia, which made its first-ever quarterly pretax loss in January-March, is cutting annual costs at its key handset unit alone by more than 700 million euros ($1.2 billion) to counter plunging phone demand.

To cope with slowing phone demand Nokia is trying to build a new business from mobile Internet services like games or maps.

Games and music have been spearheads of Nokia's services push, but its mobile gaming offering has had little success, and its much-hyped music offering, which bundles free music downloads with a sold phone, has also found few clients.

Nokia will also sell games and music through the Ovi Store.

Analysts said Nokia's key opportunity in the battle between mobile software supermarkets lies in the scale of its phone business - it sells more than 400 million phones a year, compared with Apple's total of some 20 million iPhones.