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

The Apple App Store has proved extremely popular, with one billion applications downloaded in less than a year, and operators and technology firms including Vodafone Nokia, and Microsoft now want a piece of the pie. 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. “The long awaited arrival of Nokia’s Ovi Store lacks the blaze of publicity Apple was able to achieve when its App Store burst onto the market – Nokia is going to have to spend a small fortune on marketing to make consumers aware of what it is offering,” Wood said.

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 ($979.7 million) 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. “Ovi Store is in some ways the last castle for Nokia – both N-Gage and ‘Comes with Music’ are industry laughing stocks,” said Global Crown analyst Tero Kuittinen. 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. “Ovi Store is where Nokia tries to re-group and muster its forces for a counter-offensive,” Kuittinen said.

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. Gartner’s Carolina Milanesi said Nokia has to simplify its offering to consumers, while focusing on the social networking aspects, like friend referral, in the store. “This is a much better way to help find the right app than the ‘top 25′ list,” she said. In late April, Nokia said it would have operator billing – something it expects to boost takeup – in place in eight countries for its launch, but dropped an earlier goal of including the key U.S. market from the start. Research firm Strategy Analytics has forecast the value of the mobile content market – including downloadable games, ringtones, wallpapers, video, mobile TV, text alerts and mobile Web browsing – to grow 15 percent this year to $62 billion.

A few images are also making rounds showing off the new handsets latest rear panel material. From steel to glossy black and now apparently matt black is the new look. Other rumors are talking about the Apple logo being able to light up like the laptops. Stay Tuned for more on the new iPhone.

Skype has been pushing to make its service work on the most popular advanced phones with an aim to expending its more than 400 million users who were mostly lured by the promise of cheap and sometimes free calls made using its computer application. Skype Chief Operating Officer Scott Durchslag said he has high hopes for the application’s success on Apple Inc’s popular iPhone as he expects Skype’s most feature-rich mobile offering to appeal to new and existing customers. “The No. 1 request we get from customers is to make Skype available on iPhone. There’s a pent-up demand,” Durchslag said in an interview before the CTIA annual mobile showcase in Las Vegas, where Skype plans to launch the service on Tuesday.

In May it will launch Skype for Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices, which popularized mobile email. It has already announced Skype for Nokia phones and for phones based on Android, Google Inc’s mobile system, and Windows Mobile, from Microsoft Corp.

CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood said the new applications give Skype a chance to boost its mobile phone position, which has been weaker than that of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter or News Corp’s MySpace. One of Skype’s unusual iPhone features is the fact that it allows subscribers use to the phone numbers in their existing iPhone address book so they do not need duplicate lists. “Whether you’re Twitter, MySpace or Facebook you want to be embedded in the address book,” said Wood. “This puts Skype firmly into the game.” Skype’s iPhone application will be free to download and will allow free calls between Skype users.

As with Skype on the desktop, fees will be charged for calls to traditional phones. The service will also work on later versions of Apple’s latest iPod Touch device, which has Wi-Fi links but no cellular connection. The iPod Touch launched September 2008 has a microphone, unlike the first iPod Touch launched in 2007. While Skype video is very popular with desktop customers, Durchslag said that the company is still considering whether it will offer video for the iPhone or other phones. “We’re considering video carefully but we have a really high bar on the quality,” and how the user interaction will work with other applications on iPhone, he said. “If we do it we will have to do it incredibly well.” CCS’s Wood said that if Skype can replicate the popularity of its desktop video feature on the cellphone it would help a mobile category that has been slow to take off, as well as boost its own status in cellphones. “I’m firmly convinced that if Skype could find a way to bridge all those cellphone cameras and laptop cameras it might kick start a video telephony opportunity,” he said.

While mobile Skype has has been available for some time in other countries such as the United Kingdom, it has been slow to catch on in the United States partly due to carrier concern that it would cannibalize their phone call revenue. In the United States for example, AT&T Inc has had a monopoly on calls made from iPhones, as it is the exclusive carrier here. But Wood said that Skype has actually shown that it can boost consumer spending on cellphones as it encourages use of the phones for other services such as data. For example he said that its success on networks such as 3 UK, owned by Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, suggests that carrier fears have been unfounded. “The only area where I think there are some question mark is that it could erode roaming revenues,” he said, noting that some consumers particularly in Europe hesitate to use their phones while outside of their carrier territory because of notoriously high roaming fees. “The carriers will be suspicious of this service but what we’ve learned from other markets is that (Skype) did not have the detrimental effect feared,” he said.

A gentleman named Vic Gundotra; VP of engineering at Google, just recently at MWC 09 showed eager visitors a working version of an offline Gmail web application. As of now reports are saying that Gundotra had stated that this was just a “technical concept” right now that essentially depends on HTML5’s AppCache and Database standards, that would have the application as well as all the user data on the handset.

The same reports also mentioned that the application was running on the newest Android handset from HTC – the Magic. The application also featured a floating toolbar for tracking information like emails and browsing.

This is as official as it can get for now. However, Google has released no official statements about the apps release or its price so stay tuned.