We have been eagerly awaiting download stats for Panda Route, our travel planner widget, ever since it passed QA and was published in the Nokia Ovi store.

By the end of last week Nokia finally launched its reporting tool for the Ovi store. Now publishers can measure their application’s success (or failure). The tool is pretty basic, yet very useful. It shows you the amount of downloads and/or purchases - sorted by devices and countries - and your estimated revenue. I am sure there will be more reporting options coming out soon.

The process of publishing on Ovi is pretty straightforward: you create a new content item, upload a file (the widget package in our case), then you define which devices the content is compatible with and submit it to Nokia’s Quality Assurance department. After about a week or so your content will have passed (or failed) QA and goes public after a few more days. A couple of days later you can then see statistics about your content item - download numbers being the most interesting ones for us (our widget is free), but of course also gained revenue etc.

The first look at our stats made us smile. We did not expect much, since our widget was launched not even two weeks ago and it is only available for the new Nokia N97. Since launch we are seeing a constant download rate of about 30 to 40 each day and we’ll hit the 1000-mark soon.

Most downloads we had came out of Italy (almost 50 % off all) followed by UK, Germany, Spain, USA and France, we also see downloads from other places such as China.

We still have have two weeks of premium placement available that we won at the Nokia Hackathon, so it will be interesting to see if this placement will boost the number of downloads significantly.

From our experience so far it is worth to take a look at the Ovi store and think about publishing your content there. A blog post about our widget development and which tools Nokia offers to developers is coming soon.