Five Guys Ottawa:  As of the writing of this post there are currently 3 Five Guys locations open in Ottawa with another location soon to open in Orleans.

Five Guys – Grant Crossing
5517 Hazeldean Rd Bldg C2 Unit 6
Stittsville, ON K2S 0P5
Phone: 613-836-1800
Hours: 11am-10pm Every Day

Five Guys – Barrhaven
1181 Greenbank Road
Nepean, ON K2J 4Y6
Phone: 613-823-0093
Hours: 11am-10pm Every Day

Five Guys – Trainyard
525 Industrial Blvd.
Ottawa, ON K1G 3S2
Phone: 613-562-8119
Hours: 11am-10pm Every Day

Five Guys – Orleans
Coming Soon!
3732 Innes Road
Orleans, ON K1W 0C8
Hours: 11am-10pm Every Day

I had originally gone to the Five Guys Trainyard location on a Thursday evening around 7:00 PM and I didn’t even go inside after looking in and seeing the place was packed with no room to sit.  A few days later, on a Sunday we went to the Five Guys location on Hazeldean.  This time we went early showing up 10 minutes after opening.  Luckily we were the first ones there although by the time we had sat down people starting flowing in.  We ordered 1 regular order of Cajun style fries.  One regular hamburger fully loaded.  One little cheeseburger and one regular drink.  There is free refills on drinks!

There are no trays for eating in, everything comes packed in a paper bag, ostensibly this practice originates from when they were only a take-out place.  The grease starts soaking through the bag the almost the second they pack the food in it.  This is mostly due to the fact that they place the burgers and container of fries in the bag and then dump more fries over everything.  My advice if you’re planning on picking up take-out at Five Guys is bring a plastic bag with you to put your food in or else it could get a little messy in the car.  The Five Guys burgers come tightly wrapped in tin foil which is good.  Be prepared for some finger licking goodness but beware, it’s going to be messy!  The Cajun style fries are super tasty, no extra salt required.  I’ve never tried the regular fries but after having the Five Guys Cajun style fries I don’t think I would bother trying the regular ones.  The Five Guys regular burger has two patties whereas the little Five Guys burger only has one patty.  Our order for 2 burgers, 1 fry, 1 drink came to roughly $18 which is only slighter higher than a combo at decent fast food burger joints like A&W.  Seating is cafeteria style and thankfully the Five Guys Hazeldean location is a bit larger and doesn’t have tables crammed quite as close together as at the Trainyard.

If you’re looking to go for a burger in Ottawa that still qualifies as fast food but better and you don’t mind a bit of a messy burger than I definitely recommend Five Guys!

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Kobo Vox seems like a neat idea and definitely has a good price point for what it appears to offer.  With the Vox attempting to be more than just an eReader allowing one to perform functions of a full blown tablet the Vox fails in an epic fashion.

I had picked up a Vox for my wife at Futureshop while they were on sale for $179.99.  The rep I dealt with forewarned me that he had sold 9 of them and all 9 were returned.  I wasn’t too surprised given what I had read online but on the other hand it seemed that there were also a good number of people out there that were using the Vox without too many issues.

So I got the Kobo Vox home and handed it over to my wife and then the fun began.  Right out of the box upon powering it on you must connect it to a (your) wireless network.  If you do not have WiFi you will not be able to even use the Vox as an eReader, it will be useless to you.  Once we had connected the Vox to our WiFi it checked for updates and advised to download.  It didn’t give any other option so we proceeded.  The download failed after about 15 minutes and we couldn’t retry as it said it had ran out of storage space.  I suspect that the image it was downloading (firmware update) had taken up that space and the device wasn’t smart enough to overwrite it on retry.

We then connected the Vox to computer to see if we could access the data partition and delete that file but could not.  We performed a factory reset on the Vox and tried again.  The second attempt also failed with an error but this time we could retry and the third attempt was successful.  Once the update was installed we had to log into Kobo.  We kept getting a connection error and there was no way to skip the login.  We waited about half an hour and finally were able to login and then start using the Vox.  From the time my wife unboxed the Kobo Vox to actually being able to use it took 2 hours.

I can only imagine why so many people wouldn’t have bothered trying to get it to work and just returned it.  We really tested it out and installed flash and app managers, browsers, games, books, movies, music etc.  It’s performance is ok for the money you pay.  The speaker is not that loud, it’s kind of laggy when you’re typing or tapping the screen and requires tapping 2 or 3 times before it responds.  The status bar at the top of the screen would just stop working and the Kobo library application would error out and not display anything but errors.  From what I read online people who were experiencing the Library app issue were saying the only way to fix it was to perform a factory reset.  I actually figured out an easier way to fix that issue.  If you go to the getjar site and download/install the Kobo app it will resolve the issue.  You’ll then have two Kobo apps installed so just pick the one you installed and uninstall it.

After all the little issues and glitches we just decided to bring it back to Futureshop and exchange the Kobo Vox for the Acer Iconia 16GB 10.1 inch tablet which is an awesome device for $349.  Mind you our upgrade was almost twice the cost of the Vox but what you get for the money is outstanding.  The Iconia performs beautifully and right out of the box it’s fully functional and usable as fast as you can turn it on.

I’m pleasantly surprised at a couple of high end tablets that are now available in the $350 price range.  I’m sure they’ll give the higher priced tablets a run for their money.  IMHO if you’re going to start dropping $600 and up on a tablet you might as well buy a laptop which for the same amount of money is way more powerful has tons more storage and can do all the things a tablet can’t.

If you’re looking for just an eReader I would advise to get just an eReader.  If you’re looking for a tablet that you can also read on I recommend you get a real tablet.  For all that it appears to be, problems abound with the Kobo Vox.

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