Nokia says it has over 250,000 Ovi email clients

MONACO: The world's top cellphone maker Nokia said on Wednesday more than 250,000 people have opened Nokia's Ovi email accounts during the four months since the service was opened.

Nokia, which controls close to 40 per cent of the global cellphone market, is targeting first-time email users, mostly in emerging markets, with its Ovi email service.

"We just put it up there, and more than a quarter of a million people signed up," Purnima Kochikar, a director of the consumer messaging business at Nokia, said in a speech at Nokia's developer conference in Monaco.

She said 10 of the top 12 Ovi-using countries were emerging markets.

Blackberry-maker Research in Motion created the market for mobile email, and its dominance has thwarted Nokia's attempts to crack the market in recent years.