Today we met up for some Four Starters Sushi lunch at Sushi Express underneath Potsdamer Platz. We had some excellent sushi for rock bottom prices. Good food for low prices is a very welcome experience. We haven’t been disappointed yet.

Our rendez-vous was the Sony Store in the similarly named Sony Centre. What appears to be a reasonable implementation of an Apple store, could very well have been geek heaven, but fell short on some important points. This comes back to the stuff about experience design we had been talking about yesterday, with some of these products you really wonder what they were thinking.

All sony stuff was live on display to play with. Some of it more succesfully than others. Nice batch of HD videocameras, a mediocre range of SE phones and the Sony SLR range, which is decent but I don’t understand why anybody would bother with.

The real killer was the laptops section where there were some 11″ laptops. The size of the screen was pretty tolerable (Apple should bring out one of these) but the keyboard was shrunk in such a way that typing normally had become impossible.

Even worse was the Sony UMPC that was on display. Clunky —I think you could call it massive— with plastic sliders and other strange controls. Slides open to reveal a keyboard and even has a webcam and finger print scanner. I don’t know what function this device is supposed to fulfill but playing with it for longer than a couple of minutes was an actively painful experience.

Add to this the horribly negative reviews of the T-Mobile Shadow and the Nokia N81 and it looks like device managers are getting desperate. Who will save them?