There are rumors stating that Nokia is planning to launch an application store for its Symbian platform at next week's Mobile World Congress to be held in Barcelona. This seems to be claimed by one blogger who found out from another blogger, who claims to have seen it with his own eyes that Nokia has plans to launch an Application Store. An app store is not farfetched for Nokia. Nokia has invested a lot into acquiring Symbian and also expanding the OS through an open source alliance with Samsung, LG, Sharp and others. Nokia also has some distribution platforms of Symbian apps but are not attractive or cohesive for users and developers.

Centralized App stores are now the talk of the town ever since Apple launched its successful iPhone App Store via iTunes. Google has also tried to repeat that success for its Android OS with the Android Marketplace Symbianite Samsung opened its own app store last week. Recently Wall Street Journal has said that Microsoft may get into app action with an "online bazaar". It would be exciting to see what type of competition Nokia is likely to give others.

[PCWorld]