I had the opportunity to attend the grand opening of the new Sony Style store and Comcast Labs, located in the Comcast Center (Comcast’s main corporate headquarters) at 17th and Market in Philadelphia.

The Comcast Center is also home to “The Market at Comcast Center”, a area with a bunch of food stalls and shops, and “The Comcast Experience,” a 2,000 square-foot LED screen, with a resolution 500% greater than that of an HDTV. The Sony Style store / Comcast Labs is accessed through a large staircase in the main Comcast Center building, near the giant LED screen. You can see part of the entrance stairway and the LED screen the photo below:

You can also access it from the Market entrance, either way, you have to go underground, but it is wheel chair accessible.

We will take a look inside the store and lab, after the jump.

The Store / Lab is a unique combination of every Sony product you can imagine, from TV’s to Blueray Movies to the Sony Reader. There were also sections of the store which were displaying Comcast’s current and future products like, VOIP, Digital Cable and soon 100 Mpbs Broadband. There were demos of all of the Comcast products available, including the internet, where I conducted a speed test with both the provided Comcast speed test tool and DSLReports.com, but it turns out that DSLReports can not properly interpreted extremely high speed results, so I had to throw the test out (hell, It cant even correctly interpret my Gigabit university connection). Lets take a look at the Comcast results:

The labs also had Comcast’s next generation of VoIP systems, where you can have up to 5 different numbers going into one system. The system can operate over a wired connection, as well as a 3G card.

The rest of the store was mainly Sony products. And the best way to look at my trip is to go through the gallery, and look at my comments attached to every picture. Overall, the store had an open lay out which could be liked to three different “rooms”and the connecting space between them. One room had all of Sony’s Vaio laptops (P, Z, CS, FW, and AW lines) and a Playstation area, another with Sony’s cameras, both still and video, as well as the Sony Reader, and the third with home theater setups and TV’s. In between the home theater area and the other two store areas was a selection of blue ray titles and a blue ray player playing a demo. I was surprised to see that it was a wide arrange of titles, including some that were not from Sony Pictures Entertainment, like The Simpsons Movie, which is from 20th Century Fox. Another thing that I found interesting is that for any cables Sony thinks it should sell, but doesn’t make, it uses Monster brand cables.

Check out the Gallery to see everything inside the Sony Style Store and Comcast Labs.

–Keith Hobin