I've been to a Sony Store.

Posted by Hello. on December 12, 2012 09:39 pm 15

I just entered in the store by curiosity and it was one of the worst experience I've ever had.

Let's begin with the appearance. The store was ugly and messy. There was one, or maybe two, phone displayed and so I decided to try it.

I grabbed it, the phone seemed very heavy. The reason ? It was in a case attached to a cable that would pull the phone back to his slot. Why wouldn't Sony try to find a better solution ? I mean, they have enough engineers and money to do something like in the Apple Stores, don't they ?

Then I tried to play with the phone, only to find out it wasn't even on and had a print of the home screen instead of the screen. Seriously, what's the point of putting a phone on display if customers can't even play with it ? To see the design of the phone ? No, it was partly hidden by a case and seemed heavier than it really is because of some amateurish anti-theft solution.

So I asked the salesman to try a real one. He went to his desk, took a phone without any protection and gave it to me. And probably because the phone was naked, two people of the staff stayed next to me while I was trying it. At that moment, I really felt like an annoyance for the staff members. They were staring at me. I launched the menu and did some gestures that apparently were unique to the iPhone. "Oh, you're used to the iPhone". Then the guy took his iPhone out of his pocket for no real reason and showed me how that was nearly the same thing with both phone.

So, the salesman owned an iPhone. I asked why, amused. His response was even more amusing : he doesn't like the iPhone but his wife wanted to have only iPhones and as soon as his subscription will end, he will buy the Xperia. Please note that he had an iPhone 4s and told me that happened 3 years ago. At that point, I wondered why anyone in my case would choose an Xperia instead of an iPhone.

And then things got even worse. He started to tell me about the Xperia, stating that "while the iPhone 5 had very bad reviews, the Xperia (something, how come I can't even remember the name ?) had been critically acclaimed. While he was saying that, I couldn't help but notice the lags as I was navigating through the home screen. He went on bashing the iPhone 5 with false claims.

I really wanted to do something with the phone so I launched Angry Birds. The annoying salesman visibly liked that and yelled at his colleague "He is playing my favorite game !". I immediately stopped playing.

Then I don't remember how but he took the phone out of my hands to show me "a view of everything that's on your home screen". By pinching the home screen, I could see every widgets in one place, except they were moving for no reasons and when I would succeed to tap on one, it would just take me to the page where the widget is. WHAT'S THE POINT OF THAT ? This is one of the stupidest thing I've ever seen.

Conclusion : I don't care anymore if Sony is dying, they deserved it.