JasonLandals.com

It’s Just Across From The Santa Maria

This past Saturday, I headed out to the well known West Edmonton Mall to check out one of the latest stores to open. For those that don’t know, West Edmonton Mall was for the longest time the biggest shopping mall in the world. Thanks to the construction boom in China it’s now relegated to the largest mall in North America, and the fourth largest in the world. That still doesn’t stop it from attracting a large number of tourists every year, as well as a number of unique retailers not seen anywhere else in Edmonton. My destination today is just a retailer.

That’s right, the biggest mall in North America now has an outlet for one of the most hyped brands online. Joining the ranks of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, we now have our own Apple Store. Apple’s products are decent, but thanks to the barbarian hordes know as the Apple fanboy you’d think Apple was the second coming of Jesus. Yes they are surprisingly absent from the above pic. That’s because I went to weekend after opening weekend. I don’t dig mass hysteria over a single company, don’t like getting up before 10:00 AM on a Saturday unless there’s a damn good reason, and I had another miracle to witness that morning. Even with all that, I was still drawn to the place. I had to check out the gadgets within, which I’ll further showcase after the jump.

Inevitably I gravitated over the new iPhone 3G. This is the iPhone’s legitimate debut in Canada, and it’s been a fairly rocky start. There was of course the epic failure of Rogers to provide plans suitable (and affordable) enough to take full advantage of the iPhone. They have since righted those wrongs somewhat, or done what Canadian corporations do best and place a band-aide solution over top of the problem in the hopes that people would forget. Unfortunately they then managed to team with Apple in a tag team of failure that resulted first in Apple’s iTunes servers going down temporarilty, and then Rogers going down permanently for the day.

So is the device worth all the hype? Well as much as enjoy poking fun at the Apple-crazed, I have to say that the device is at least decent. The interface is intuitive, and the multitouch is a joy to use. Is it worth the money paid? No, but for the simple fact that Rogers hasn’t really address the plan pricing outside of the initial three month deal they’ve offered (aka the honeymoon phase). And that’s half the joke, because in what amounts to one big cock tease you have to go to Rogers to buy an iPhone. They have them on display at the Apple Store, but you have to go elsewhere to buy them.

The next product I had to check out was the MacBook Air. I’m a fan of the smaller form-factor laptops, as my continued use of a Dell Inspiron 700m will attest to. When the MacBook Air was first released, I was cautious. After all it doesn’t have an optical drive, NIC, or removable battery. I always held up the Lenovo Thinkpad X300 as the small form factor to aspire to. That was all based on paper specs. Now that I’ve seen, touched, and played with the Air, I have to say my curiousity has been piqued.

Thinking about how I use my laptop, I’m forced to consider whether or not I can live without the missing accoutrements. Does the MacBook Air spin straw into gold as the fanboys would have you believe? Dear god no, it’s just a laptop. Still it’s a very nice laptop.

Overall I’m not completely filled with vitriol, ready to spit it out over the whole experience. This new Apple Store is a neat place to go and check out some nifty looking computers and gadgets. If you are a Mac fanatic living in the capital region, this is essentially your mecca. If you are just a gadget head, this adds another nifty layer to the high tech parfait that is Edmonton. I’ve included all the pictures I took in a gallery below.