Microsoft and Opera are singing the swan song for the Nokia store of feature phones as the Redmond, Wash., company continues its efforts to distance itself from the Nokia brand.
Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia's handset division earlier this year brought with it the rights to use the Finnish handset maker's brand for up to 10 years.
While the Microsoft Lumia 535 marked the company's first departure from the Nokia brand in the handset field, Microsoft's France division leaked news, later confirmed, that the tech company was abandoning its 10-year branding rights in favor of marketing its own name. Those rebranding efforts, which have been rolled out region by region, have reached the online portal for Nokia feature phones.
The Nokia store houses apps for Nokia devices that run on operating systems with shrinking markets such as Symbian or the Asha platform. The apps, however, will live on in Opera's app store, now that the browser developer has come to terms with Microsoft.
At some point in the first quarter of 2015, the Nokia store apps will transition to the Opera market. After the transition, customers using legacy Nokia devices running the Series 40, Series 60, Symbian, Asha, and Nokia X operating systems will be redirected to the Opera Mobile Store when they attempt to access the shuttered Nokia site.
"When the current users of the Nokia Store are migrated to Opera Mobile Store, they will continue to get fresh, interesting apps for their Nokia phones," says Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software. "The Opera Mobile Store becomes an even more significant player in the app store market, and Nokia mobile phone users get a first-class app store for years to come."
Opera says its mobile store supports more than 7,500 different devices and houses almost 300,000 apps. In a separate agreement, settled in August 2014, Opera's Mini was commissioned as the official mobile browser for legacy Nokia devices, replacing the Nokia Xpress browser on low-end and midrange handsets.
Microsoft is happy to have reached a deal with Opera to deliver apps for Symbian devices, but the company isn't ending support for legacy Nokia devices, according to Rich Bernardo, Microsoft's vice president of phones.
"We continue to sell and support classic Nokia devices, which remain popular in many parts of the world," says Bernardo.
The Nokia Store will close once all handsets are transitioned to Opera, a move which is expected to be completed by July 2015.
While Microsoft may be abandoning the Nokia brand, the Finnish tech company still believes in the name it has made for itself. On the same day Opera and Microsoft announced the impending closure of the Nokia app store, Nokia debuted a new Android Tablet, the Nokia N1.
