Nokia, the world’s largest cell phone maker, on Wednesday launched a series of products and services aimed squarely at Apple’s dominant digital music franchise and its new iPhone. The Finnish handset manufacturer also said it would reinvent itself as an Internet company that puts online services at the heart of its strategy.

At a press conference in London on Wednesday, the company unveiled the Nokia Music Store, an Internet music download service, similar to Apple’s iTunes, which will be available to users of specially optimized Nokia phones. The company, which controls more than a third of the worldwide cell phone market, said it would wrap its new music service and its N-Gage online game service into an Internet package under the company’s new Ovi brand.

The Ovi service will let users access their existing social networks, communities and content. The company said it was planning to launch more Internet services under the Ovi brand in the coming months.

The Finnish group also announced a new version of its flagship N95 phone with a more user-friendly interface and up to 8 gigabytes of storage—the same as the iPhone.

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said the future of the company will lie increasingly with services.

“Nokia is already the number one mobile device company, he said. “Looking into the future,” he added, “we will deliver great devices, combined with compelling experiences and services, to make it easy for people to unlock the potential of the Internet.”

The next 12 months, he said, will see the company “integrate new user interface elements, service suites and web communities to Ovi.”

Nokia Music Store pricing is pitched straight at Apple’s iTunes. Individual tracks will cost €1.00 ($1.36) and albums will cost from €10.00 ($13.62). A computer-only streaming option will be made available at a monthly subscription of €10.00 ($13.62). The service is to be rolled out across Europe starting in the fourth quarter if this year with Asia following in the first half of next year.

Further adding to the anti-Apple flavor of the announcements, Nokia has chosen Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (WMA) format for the music tracks. The company said it was emphasizing an open standards approach to the Internet. Without mentioning Apple, Nokia communications manager Kari Tuutti emphasized that Nokia “was not locking people into a specific device, unlike some of our competitors.”

The launch of Apple's iPhone in June marks the first time a new phone brand has been able to make a significant inroad into the 1-billion-unit-per-year market. This alone would be disturbing to Nokia, but Apple's ability to wrestle a significant slice of service revenues from operators, a long cherished Nokia ambition, must be even more vexing.