Nokia bought Avvenu last year, and relaunched it as Files on Ovi (or is that Ovi Files?). Aside from a few automatic updates and a new WRT widget, there hasn’t been much action around Files on Ovi lately, and I’ve been thinking about a few things that Nokia could do that would certainly add value to the service, and make me more likely to pay for the Anytime Files online storage part.
For starters, a phone application that would setup something like an FTP to my Anytime Files would be awesome – this would let me upload files to my Files on Ovi account straight from my phone, either to share those with a friend (via expiring SMS link) or to download to my computer or another phone. Currently, you cannot upload files to Files on Ovi from your phone, which is a major opportunity.
Branching off this phone upload feature would be the ability to automatically backup my phone and upload that to my Files on Ovi account. Picture something like Apple’s Time Machine application, only integrated into your phone, so that at any given time, if your phone gets hosed, you could quickly download and restore a backup file from Files on Ovi and be on your way. Currently, when you use the backup feature on your phone, that backup is stored to your memory card. While that’s safe in the event of a firmware update (on older phones) or hard reset, it’s not safe if your phone gets smashed, or water damaged, or anything like that. Even cooler (and perhaps a bit further looking) is if, while the backup was resting safely on the Files on Ovi server, it was automatically converted (or converted upon request) to be useful on another phone. That way, if you kill a Nokia E71, but get a Nokia E75 to replace it, you would still have a backup file to restore. Now *that* would be worth paying for.
In similar fashion, I’d like to be able to use Files on Ovi to store a backup of my N-Gage games and game data – including registration status and more importantly, game save information. There currently doesn’t seem to be a guaranteed way to back up this specific information, which is really frustrating.
Do you use Files on Ovi? If so, do you think these added features would make it a much better service offering? Would you pay for a service like this, as long as it was tightly integrated into your phone, such as the Remote Drives feature on S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 phones?
