one million activated accounts is an impressive achievement, especially given Nokia have yet to put a significant marketing campaign behind Ovi Mail. However, to put this in context, Hotmail has 343 million users, Yahoo Mail has 285 million and Gmail has 146 million (source: Comscore, July 2009). Clearly there's plenty of growth potential ahead.
Ovi Mail, perhaps more than any other Ovi service, demonstrates Nokia's determination to bring services to its entire portfolio of devices. Ovi Mail is primarily targeted at first time email users. Nokia Messaging, by contrast, is targeted at those who already have an email address, but want to access it from their phone. Nokia are gradually rolling out more devices with Ovi Mail and Nokia Messaging built in to the standard email wizard / set up process, but there is still some way to go.
Here's an extract form the press release:
"More than just reaching a company milestone, this proves to us that there is a real appetite in the developing world for these types of tailored services," said Tom Furlong, head of Consumer Messaging at Nokia. "For first-time email users, Ovi Mail provides a digital identity and we are thrilled by its rapidly rising adoption rate."
The inspiration for Ovi Mail came from the growing number of people, mostly in developing countries, without access to a PC. The top five countries for Ovi Mail subscribers are India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. Since its inception in December 2008, Ovi Mail is available in more than 180 countries and supports 20 languages.
Ovi Mail is free to set-up straight out of the box and comes with spam filters to block unwanted emails. It is also accessible from a broad range of Nokia devices with the Nokia 2330 classic, Nokia 2630 and Nokia 5310 XpressMusic being some of the most popular devices used.
Ovi Mail can be set up from the email wizard of most recent Nokia phones, or by visiting mail.ovi.com.