Its new 2,200 sq ft store in Jurong Point, which was officially opened on Thursday, has mood lighting, cafe-style customer service seating, and a 100-inch flatscreen 'living room' to show off its mioTV offerings.

It wants people to shop and buy music, games, movies even after the store closes at 9pm. Four huge touch-screens which let people hunt out deals and purchase music for the cellphones are embedded in the glass walls of the store, and accessible from the outside.

These ideas were cribbed from various retail concepts worldwide, its spokesman said.

The Jurong Point outlet is also the first of its rebranded stores, renamed the SingTel shop, and the same 'lifestyle' concept will be progressively rolled out to the other 10 hello! shops it has now over the next three years.

SingTel's chief executive officer for Singapore, Mr Allen Lew, said the move is to ensure the telco stays ahead of its competitors, despite the tougher times.

'When people are cutting back, you need to stand out more,' he said.

The company had been looking for a space in the Jurong area to serve the roughly one million residents there, he said, and on realising 'there were a lot of competitors there, if we opened a plain old hello! shop, it would be difficult to attract people in', he said.

He would not say how much the company had invested in the rebranding exercise, just that 'we looked at the sales needed to support (this type of store) and it was not significantly more'. 'It's not a big stretch to make it financially viable,' he said.