What does the New York have to say about the flagship Nokia store?

The Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Store makes the futuristic Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) Store look like Little House on the Prairie. The building’s peacock-blue façade, one of the few parts of the store you cannot interface with, seems to be made out of gigantic plastic pieces from an educational toy. Inside the narrow, three-level, two-thousand-square-foot space, luminescent Plexiglas walls and Barry White-inflected music make you feel as if you’d walked into an airport cocktail lounge. Should you wish to change the color of the panels from magenta to cyan or any of the other sixty choices, sit down on a bar stool, pick up one of the cell phones attached to the counters that flank the room, and send a text message to the wall (actually, to a plasma screen). You can also click to control the images on screens, to switch, say, bubbling bubbles to alphabet letters blowing in the wind. Or you can send a note to the walls in any of the other five Nokia stores in the world. You can also walk upstairs, snap a picture of yourself with the superb optics built into the N93 phone, and print a copy of it to take home.

There is merchandise for sale, too, but retailing hardly seems to be the point. The salespeople—and there are a lot of them—work without commission and, if you ask, they will spend hours fixing your old Nokia or programming your new one. If you want to buy a Nokia phone here, you will pay roughly a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars more than you would for the same equipment at another store, because at the Nokia Store it comes without a calling plan. “The store is about learning,” Keith Nowak, manager of media relations, says. “It’s the only place you can see the full line of Nokia devices and find out which is the best for your needs.” And just who is in need of the gold and platinum diamond-encrusted phones found in the third-floor Vertu lounge ($4,800 to $150,000; $520 for an ostrich-leather case)? The price of these handsets includes the service for one year of a full-time concierge, who will, for instance, book theatre tickets and make dinner reservations. Sorry: price for your call to the concierge not included.

Source: The New Yorker

You know this is quite frustrating, 1.5 years ago I could’ve swiped my metro card and been on my way. Now I live in Texas. I’ll probably go visit NY next summer, after all having 3 months between semesters gives me plenty of time to slack. I can’t believe they said it was fancier than the Apple store. I haven’t been to the cube on 5th ave but the one in SoHo is sheer beauty. Don’t worry though, for CES I plan on taking a full photo tour of the Nokia booth.