A Tour of Nokia’s Newest Concept Store

Here in Mumbai, there are cellphone shops everywhere. Nokia has quite a few shops here and there, but they are usually small and empty, with the staff sitting around idly.

That being said, a couple of days ago Nokia opened up a new Nokia Concept Store here in Mumbai. They bought over the shop next to their old existing store, and joined them to make this new, pretty huge place. Interestingly, the entire construction and setting up of the store barely took any time at all, with workers there day and night.

I went there on a Monday morning, at about 11am. There was a huge watchman waiting to open the door for me. On entering in, there were 3 guys at the counter. I had my N82 with me, so I asked one of them if I could get a new pair of headphones for it. First, he was a bit confused and said they don’t sell headphones for my device, but then showed me a basic black pair. Not really what I was looking for, so I moved on to check out the rest of the shop.

They had two main sections. One had the high end Eseries and Nseries phones. The other one had the low end S60, and the S40 phones. No prizes for guessing where I went first.

They had the E75 which I quickly proceeded to check out. I found its Qwerty Keyboard a little weird, and the headphone jack looked a bit cheap, but the phone feels great !

While I was checking out the phone the store guy came around and stood right behind me. For fun, while I was checking out the camera I managed to click a picture of him (I really should have saved that picture, his expression was hilarious!).

After fiddling around with the N96 and E63, I moved on to the other counter. Here were the various S40, and Xpress Music phones (5800 and 5320 notably). The 5320 in my opinion, is probably the best VFM phone there is.

They also had another section with a few accessories and a huge variety of bluetooth headsets. Bluetooth headsets always tempt me, but I have a horrible track record with them, having lost 3 so far.

When I asked the staff if I could click a few pictures inside the store for our site,  they kept looking at each other and finally decided “No!”. Apparently I couldn’t click any pictures because “They weren’t in a position to allow me to”. Oh well ! I managed to get a couple pictures of the store from the outside anyway.

Here’s a picture of a nearby bus stop which has an ad for the concept store on it :

“Touch The Future” indeed.

All in all, its a decent store, but not really something that matches up to, say, the Apple Stores. Where are the cheery staff ? The N-Gage Code Giveaways ? Demo Units ?

Do you have a Nokia Concept Store near you ? What has your experience with them been like ? Do tell !

- Aatif Sumar