After seeing Tut, I pulled my dad off to check out the new Nokia store on Michigan avenue:
All-in-all, I can't say that I walked away terribly impressed. While Nokia did have a nice array of phones on display to be pawed at, and the staff seemed knowledgeable, the whole experience wasn't as "sticky" as a trip to the Apple store. The main problem, as I see it, is that none of the phones that I saw on display were "on the network". So, that means that it was impossible to test things like the WAP browser, e-mailing photos to friends, etc. Basically, since mobile phones are meant to always be on the network, a good chunk of each phone's functionality was untestable.
Lame.
To contrast this with the Apple store, you can try out basically everything before you buy. All of the machine are on the Internet, and you can run any application you want. That is how you should run a store.
-Andy.