Since I got my new phone, I naturally decided to get the lastest Ovi Suite from Nokia for my PC. The blurb on this piece of software is quite interesting. Apparently, they’ve thrown PC Suite out of the Window, and started from scratch for Ovi Suite.

First, a little background info. Ovi is the new service launched by Nokia, to keep your contacts, photos, mail etc. in one place. Sort of like the hub between the PC and your mobile phone. It’s not exactly 100% original (ref. MobileMe from Apple), but it’s the gesture that counts… In the new Ovi Store, you can buy applications and music for your phone as well.

One small point, from your PC, you can browse around in the Ovi Store, but to download anything, you’ll have to do it from your device. This is pretty crappy, mainly because, without a dedicated data plan on your connection, it will cost you an arm and a leg to download anything at all.

I’ve been using PC Suite for a while, with my old mobile, and it’s been great. It was relatively light weight, and syncing contacts, messages and the calendar didn’t take anytime at all. The inbuilt music manager was a bit weak, but it was soon replaced with Ovi Music (not to be confused with Ovi Suite). One thing I liked about PC Suite, was that it was fast, and it looked clean.

Ovi Music is good, but it’s extremely resource hungry, takes ages to start up, and worst of all, doesn’t read IDv3 ratings from the files. This is very important for me, because I keep all my songs rated, and create auto playlists to manage syncing to my iPod and mobile. So, I don’t use Ovi Player much. Plus, there’s no way to transfer ratings from any other player to Ovi Player, so there was no way I was going to be using that software on a daily basis.

So, let me get back to Ovi Suite, the software. First thing’s first, it’s kinda huge. 93MB huge to be precise. On the home page, you’re presented with 4 things – Contact, Photos (and Videos), Messaging and Music. All of them are really self-explanatory. Once you hook up your phone, it takes a while for it to recognise it.

One really irritating thing is that each time you connect your phone, it will go through the entire process of identifying and syncing. And it is terribly slow, when it comes to syncing contacts. I mean, all the contacts put together will be well under an MB, but it still takes a couple of minutes to sync them. Then it starts syncing photos and videos. Listen Nokia, if I move my files after syncing them from my mobile, does not mean I want another copy in the folder YOU choose. Geddit?

And the absolute worst thing about is is that it’s hellbent on syncing stuff when you connect your mobile, even after you uncheck all of the auto-sync options. Couple that with the fact that you could erode a mountain by the time it syncs contacts, and that it will not let you copy anything into or out of the mobile before the sync is over, means that it’s very frustrating working on this application.

Plus, once you install it, it still looks user friendly but it is not resource friendly at all. The bloody thing idles at 200 MB! Plus, it is extremely sluggish, when you change tabs. The map loader is a good thing, but now a separate app is available for that, so it’s kind of pointless.

On a whole, I’m extremely disappointed with Ovi Suite, will recommend that they cut their own legs off before installing it. I for one, am sticking to good ol’ PC Suite.