Mobile phone giant Nokia rolled out its Ovi Store online store to an estimated 5 million Nokia device owners across more than 50 Nokia devices, but its first day of operations were met with complaints.

The Finnish company said customers can visit store.ovi.com through their Nokia device browser to immediately begin downloading, personalizing and making their devices smarter and more fun with applications, games, videos, podcasts, productivity tools, web and location-based services and much more.

Ovi Store is open for business and we've stocked the shelves with both local and global content for a broad range of Nokia devices, said Tero Ojanperä, Executive Vice President, Nokia Services. Ovi Store makes shopping for content and applications easy and fun for feature phone and smartphone owners alike.

However, clients told a quite different story. After firsthand experience with Ovi, TechCrunch journalist Robin Wauters wrote that the Ovi Store launch is a complete fail on Nokia’s part with a service being rushed out the door before it was ready for prime time.

Wauters experienced slow loading speed for hours and also lamented the user experience as well.

Navigating the online store is downright complicated, and the categories being assigned to certain applications and content are way off at times.

Waurers advised Nokia in his blog to tell us you’re open for business when you actually are.

Nokia attributed the slow performance with “extraordinarily high spikes of traffic “

and said that it will immediately begin to remedy the problem. The Ovi Store device client, has continued to perform very well and there were no reported issues from users logged on through that entry point, said Nokia.

The mobile client is available in English, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish and supports operator billing in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom. Globally, credit card billing is available through the mobile application and the mobile website. Additional countries, languages, devices and features will be added throughout the year. AT&T plans to make Ovi Store available to its customers in the United States later this year.