Nokia Ovi Mail: Not getting it

So I got an email today from Nokia inviting me to get an email account on their Ovi Mail service.

I was a huge fan of their Share on Ovi photo service until its redesign several months back. Instead of a service that empowered you to do more than anything Flickr could do, and integrated better than Flickr with existing services built into your operating system, it became a crippled photo album. It was bad enough that despite being a free service, I got a Flickr account for which I pay. I love Nokia. They are original, free thinking and build phones that unlike my iPhone, don’t lose the call about 20-30% of the time. If they only had a better operating system on the excellent hardware… but that’s outside the scope of this post; Ovi Mail is.

After reading about Nokia introducing push email to the Philippines I was keen to see what Nokia has to offer in its mail service. This in light of the fact that Nokia still offers Nokia Messaging that consolidates emails from multiple accounts to a single inbox, which supposedly Nokia delivers to your messaging phone. Sadly, it appears that instead of a step forward, Ovi Mail is another step into ho-hum direction. In one sentence, Ovi Mail is another webmail service. Really. And like Yahoo! mail and Hotmail, it is accessible only from your web browser. There are no instructions on how to use this account anywhere outside the web.

One place where Ovi could have been great is integration with, well, the rest of Ovi. Namely, Ovi’s contact book. That would make sense. Those are extra awesome because they back up, for free, all the contacts from your Nokia phone, and sync with it. Great service, great idea. On an iPhone that would be extra cash for Mobile Me, unless you have a Microsoft Exchange email account. Sadly, your Ovi contacts are not present in Ovi Mail. Tragic, perplexing, sad.

I just wonder, what were they thinking? Is there a compelling reason to use Ovi Mail that I am missing?!