Nokia’s developer relations team would like you to remind you that Symbian has an App Store, called Ovi, and they’ve just surpassed 7.62 million downloads per day, thank you very much.

Their short announcement states that thanks to a recent change in the registration process – namely the removal of account requirements for the downloading of free apps – has sparked interest in the Ovi store. Most downloads are coming from India, making that country “the top country by downloads from the mobile web channel.”

These apps, designed for the Symbian phones Nokia is swiftly obsoleting, include titles like “Psycho Hunter” (“You play the game and we will tell your personality. It is simple game of deer hunt with good personality analysis tool for understanding your behavior and game play techniques. Test your friends for their psycho analysis.”) and something called Angry Birds which apparently involves pigs. Other hits include a few hundred flashlight apps and a Ukelele tuner.

While I am being a bit facetious, isn’t this a strange stat to crow on the eve of Microsoft and Nokia going all in to destroy the Symbian platform?

Users of Google Maps and Bing Maps have enjoyed 3D imagery for a while now, and Nokia is now catching up with the launch of (admittedly very nice-looking) photorealistic 3D models of 20 metropolitan areas from across the globe.

On Maps.ovi.com/3d, you can now explore places in 3D in major cities like London, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, San Francisco and, of course, Helsinki.

The feature is free on Ovi Maps and will be formally introduced later today at the Where 2.0 conference in California.

Starting with a bird’s-eye view, users can scale up and down and move around objects such as buildings and trees from their desktop, provided they install a browser plugin.

Plugins are available for IE 7+, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 5+ and Google Chrome. A detailed 360-degree panoramic view of streets is also available.

(In related news, Google this morning introduced ‘Map Maker’, which lets you edit Google Maps, in the United States for starters).

Nokia’s says Ovi Maps for mobile currently covers 180 countries, nearly 100 of them navigable in 53 languages. On the Web, Ovi Maps covers the same 180 countries, 93 of which are navigable in 29 languages.

Nokia boasts that its 3D offering, while late to the game, is the “most realistic available” and goes beyond rendering limited areas and buildings by making entire cities, including suburbs, available for exploration. You be the judges.

PayPal has quietly released a mobile application for Nokia devices on the Finnish mobile phone maker’s Ovi Store marketplace, a tipster points out.

Indeed, while I can’t find the app from where I’m searching (Belgium), other TechCrunchers in the United States can find the app just fine (see screenshots above and below). I’ve also tracked down blog posts from eagle-eyed bloggers in France and Italy.

The application is free, but apparently lacks support for displaying in landscape mode and consumes an excessive amount of RAM according to some early users.

According to the blog posts linked above, the application functions much like its iPhone, Android and BlackBerry siblings: you can use it to send money, manage your account, split a check and transfer money to your bank account.

From what I can gather, the app was made available on the Ovi Store earlier this week with very little fanfare. I’ve asked PayPal for confirmation as they have yet to effectively announce the existence of any mobile applications for Nokia handsets, and requested a list of countries in which the app can be downloaded from Nokia’s Ovi Store.

It is important news for an obvious reason: Nokia remains the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones with a global device market share of 31% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

PayPal, meanwhile, says it supports more than 94 million active accounts in 190 markets and 24 currencies around the world.

Screenshots of the app – in French – below courtesy of Blog-n8.fr.

Last year, the world went app crazy. If anything, 2010 was the year of the mobile App Store—not only for Apple, but also for Android, Blackberry, and even Nokia. App store analytics firm Distimo has a new report looking at Great Mobile App Store Boom of 2010. While Apple ended the year with roughly 300,000 apps in iTunes, the Android Market grew to about 130,000, while Nokia’s Ovi Store got to 25,000 apps and BlackBerry App World reached 18,000. The number of apps in iTunes doubled, but the smaller app stores grew even faster, with the number of Android apps up 544 percent, Blackberry apps up 268 percent, and Nokia apps up 258 percent.

Angry Birds is the most popular app across all mobile platforms, while Facebook is the most popular non-game app. Distimo also found that the categories with the strongest growth on the iPhone were serious business apps (up 186 percent) and medical apps (up 156 percent), whereas the fastest-growing categories on Android were more frivolous: comics (up 802 percent), card and casino games (up 644 percent), and entertainment (up 589 percent). Go figure.

The most interesting data in the report, though, comes from trends in the Apple App Store, especially looking at the difference between paid and free apps. Free apps are downloaded nearly ten times as much as paid apps. On average, the top 300 free apps in iTunes were downloaded 3 million times a day, versus 350,000 downloads a day for paid apps.

As in-app purchases took hold in the App Store (see ngmoco), the percentage of revenue coming from apps with in-app purchases grew significantly. Between June and December of last year, the share of revenues among the top-grossing iPhone apps coming from free apps with in-app purchases went from 14 percent to 34 percent. For iPad apps, that percentage was lower, going from 7 percent to 15 percent.

Paid apps without any in-app purchases still rule on the iPad, accounting for 71 percent of revenues for top-grossing apps. On the iPhone, pure-vanilla paid apps only account for 51 percent of revenues. The average price of apps declined 12 percent last year in Apple’s App Store, and the downward pressure was even greater in the other app stores,with the sweet spot settling between 99 cents and $2.99. For Apple, paid apps with in-app purchases account for almost as much revenue on the iPad (14 percent) as free apps with in-app-purchases. Whereas that segment is being squeezed on the iPhone. But remember that iPad apps have not been around as long. As the iPad becomes more mature, I suspect the revenue distribution will look more like the iPhone apps.

Big numbers coming out of Nokia land this morning. The company says its application store Ovi Store continues to gain traction, this week reaching the 3 million downloads per day milestone, up from 1 million downloads per day in the beginning of this year and 2.3 million downloads per day last month.

In addition, Nokia revealed that the total number of users of Ovi now exceeds 165 million people across more than 190 countries. Furthermore, Nokia says it is adding some 250,000 new Ovi users on a daily basis, which means roughly 7.5 million new users per month.

Update: asymco compares the number with iTunes download rates:

Nokia adds that 90 percent of visits to the Ovi Store effectively lead to an app download, and that each registered visitor downloads 2.6 apps on average. At present, 92 developers have reached the 1-million+ download milestone each for their apps, and Nokia says that number will grow to 100 by next week.

A bit of a surprise with regards to the most popular app on the Ovi Store worldwide: Rovio’s Angry Birds is number two, trailing Q Torch (made by India’s CellApp technology). Nevertheless, Angry Birds is the top-selling paid app.

Nokia also touts the popularity of its Qt SDK, which it says has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times this year alone, while 400,000 new developers are said to have signed up with Forum Nokia over the last year.

Recently, Nokia said it will focus solely on the Qt framework framework and support for HTML5 in an effort to ensure that apps will continue to be compatible with future evolutions of Symbian as well as upcoming MeeGo products.

Nokia has declared its Ovi suite of service and the Ovi Store a roaring success.

The Finnish mobile giant says 200,000 people are now signing up to its services per day, and that the total number of active Nokia service users across the globe has reached 140 million (Ovi is available in more than 190 countries).

Ovi services include the company’s mapping product, Music, Messaging and Life Tools in a select number of countries, among others.

Nokia further claims its application store (Ovi Store) is a hit on its own, with 2.3 million apps now being downloaded to phones worldwide on a daily basis.

No less than 70 app developers and publishers have surpassed the million download mark for their games, tools and whatnot in the Ovi Store. Nokia’s not afraid of name-dropping them either: Digital Chocolate, EA, Gameloft, PepsiCo, Qik and Shazam are some of the companies that see their applications increasingly land on Nokia phones.

Nokia’s first Symbian^3 powered device and answer to the iPhone and the more capable Android smartphones, the Nokia N8, yesterday started shipping to all those proud Nokia fans that pre-ordered it.

When I was at Nokia World in late 2008, I had a very nice chat at a party with a Nokia employee. I asked him about Nokia’s relative scarcity in the U.S., and he said quite frankly that the problem was Nokia’s management’s opinion of their company. Being the world’s largest cell phone maker can give you some strong opinions about yourself: if you’re doing so well in the rest of the world, why should you change your tactics to get traction in the U.S., of all places? According to this slightly inebriated man, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo opened his negotiations with Verizon by stating “We don’t need you.” Not a lot of wiggle room in that position, and there’s really no where to go but backwards. Well, the carriers feel they don’t need Nokia. I guess both opinions are technically correct, since no one is going out of business. But Nokia is losing out on a tremendous market opportunity, and U.S. carriers are losing out on some great handsets.

Whether this anecdote is accurate or not, the fact remains that Nokia is the odd man out in the U.S. I think we can all forgive Apple’s walled garden approach with its iPhone and associated app store because Apple has been a computer and software maker for a long time: this is what they do, and they have the track record to prove that they do it well. I don’t know many people who really take Nokia’s Ovi initiatives very seriously, because it’s not a core strength of Nokia’s. They’re seen as a handset manufacturer, and the expertise therein does not prima facie allow them to build and maintain a kick ass software suite.

There’s a bit over at VentureBeat that digs into this a bit more. The basic premise is consistent with what the Nokia guy at the party told me.

The beta tool, which requires a Nokia N97 device, taps into Facebook to enable you to share status updates and photos with your Facebook friends and also lets you share your location through Ovi Maps (also in beta). Here’s an introduction video featuring two polished young men using the application to hook up with each other in some city:

Also new is an extension of Nokia Messaging called Social Messaging, which interestingly Nokia calls the groundwork for an impending proprietary multi-community social networking client. The company insists this is an early look, and currently only supports Facebook:

In other news, Nokia Beta Labs is discontinuing Nokia Friend View, which was an experimental research project from Nokia Research Center. We covered the app, which was basically a location-aware microblogging tool when it was introduced in November 2008.

There are no shortage of whispers out there right now as to what Facebook’s plans for location are. With rival Twitter having recently announced its geolocation API, the pressure is on the larger network to deliver something. Tomorrow will bring a step in that direction, as Nokia will announce a new service at its Nokia World event that will utilize location within Facebook, we’ve learned.

Now, to be clear, this is not Facebook officially getting into the game itself yet, but it’s big enough that Henri Moissinac, Facebook’s director of mobile, will apparently be using his keynote address at Nokia World to unveil this, we’ve heard.

The app looks to be a direct result of the Nokia purchase of the location-based social network Plazes, in the summer of 2008. As you can see in the screenshot below, an Ovi Map (Nokia’s map property) will reside inside of Facebook and show where you are. It can also update your Facebook status with your location, and a link to it on one of these maps.

Other services such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Whrrl have applications to set your location within Facebook, but those are still rather cumbersome to use, and haven’t taken off within Facebook. Presumably, this Nokia announcement would also be tied into its mobile devices, which could get it access to millions of users right off the bat.

It’s also interesting that this Nokia/Facebook concept appears to work around “checking-in” places, which is what services like Foursquare (and Plazes before it), use for location. That’s different from something like Google Latitude or Loopt, which simply track your location.

At some point, Facebook is going to have to get off the bench and throw its considerable weight into the location-based services arena itself. That’s definitely happening, we’ve heard from many sources, but the question is, when? For now, partnerships will have to do.

“We call it the personal media network, it will offer relevant, easy and pervasive ways of discovering new content – not only applications, but video, audio, games etc.” he said.

“We think if we make our channel extremely optimized, extremely relevant and drive conversions on a global basis that could become a preferred channel for a lot of developers. We are thinking of reaching about 50m customers just by upgrading the existing download clients and leveraging existing channels like Mosh.

“We also have a relevancy engine where, whether you are in the UK, Italy or Spain say, you will get a more localised experience. So those are competitive advantages that could make this distribution channel a very scalable and hopefully profitable one for developers.”

Then he flapped his arms and ran around on the stage like a chicken. Not really.

[Via Financial Times]

After Nokia announced their Ovi Suite for the PC, most Mac users felt left out in the cold. Sure, third-party solutions were available as alternatives on a function-by-function basis, but none challenged the simple one-stop, one-click syncing/media handling of Ovi.

Looks like the Apple crowd might be getting the attention they’ve clamored for. On Monday, a “Macintosh Software Developer” job post went up in Nokia’s career section. From the post:

Join the Nokia development team to help us take our Mac user experience to the next level. This new and exciting initiative will give you a chance to become part of the Ovi development team. We work in a challenging and inspiring environment using the latest technologies to combine mobile, Mac/PC and internet user experiences together. This team will help bring enabling solutions for Nokia device owners on the Apple Mac platform, and we are now looking for highly skilled professionals with proven track record of delivering products on time to join us.

Seeing as Nokia has been claiming a Mac Ovi suite was “coming soon” for some time now, we’re hoping this job post is for the expansion of an already existing team, rather than the first steps of creating a new one. Furthermore, we hope “soon” actually means “soon” – if you’re not willing to drop $40 bucks for something like The Missing Sync, booting up Windows every time you want to sync gets old fast.

[Symbian Guru]

Nokia’s Ovi service was originally a simple photosharing system that took emailed, uploaded, and MMSed images from your phone or computer and put them online. Fair enough. Now, however, Nokia is adding some compelling features to the online suite to make it considerably more usable for personal and enterprise PIM and sharing purposes.

The first and most important update is their file sharing system. After installing the Nokia Ovi Suite on your PC or laptop – it doesn’t work with Mac although there is some talk this will be remedied – you can visit all of your files remotely via a browser on your phone or on another computer. You can preview and download any file – from documents to your CONFIG.SYS file – and upload files to your computer. Obviously you have to have your computer on to do this, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

[svgallery name="ovi"]

Ovi also as improved PIM functionality and can bring your calendars and contacts to the website where you can edit and sync with almost any Nokia phone. The service also has improved music and N-Gage game access.

These additions are clearly part of a move by Nokia to make casual users think of Symbian as a smartphone operating system rather than just something that Nokia happens to have on their phones. With casual smartphone use on the rise, sync has become the number one sticking point with most users and Nokia has long had a fairly anemic sync system.

Thanks to Nokia for hooking us up with this cool Ovi channel for the event

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For the magically uninclined, Pangea Day is a global day of films, music and speakers that will be held simultaneously in cities around the world on May 10, 2008. It’s award-winning documentary filmmaker, Jehane Noujaim of Control Room and Startup.com fame’s brainchild after winning the 2006 TED prize. The list of supporters reads like a who’s who of social, political, technical and entertainment types, but what I thought was interesting is Nokia. Remember, this is CrunchGear.

Nokia is inviting the globe to enter the 2008 Nokia Mobile Filmmaking Awards competition. You can shoot and upload your short videos to Share on Ovi to be considered for inclusion in the broadcast. Pretty cool. The winner receives a trip to LA for the event and “a mobile film making trip of a lifetime and a production budget to record the trip.” Isn’t that slightly subjective? I mean, what if my mobile film making trip of a lifetime involved midgets, goats and ninjas? Can David Blaine make that magic happen?