Review: Wynn Las Vegas
Score:
45%
If there's anything that the Las Vegas hotels are good at, it's giving you a massive experience - because at some point they know they're going to get you sitting down at a gambling table where they have at least a 0.5% advantage. But as the attraction of Vegas expands to luxury resort, spectacular shows and fantastic food, the sooner they can get you into their... ecosystem the better. Which is why the Wynn Las Vegas application is a little bit interesting.
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This is an application that is geared towards getting you ready for your visit to the Wynn Hotel, rather than providing functionality once you arrive at the complex. With lots of gallery pictures that feel like they belong in a very glossy brochure, you're taken through the rooms, shops, clubs and restaurants of the Wynn.
Probably the only part of the application that I was expecting to have any more functionality was the "Reserve" option. Would this lead to a Qt driven menu system, allowing me to check dates, hold a room, and possibly pass a booking reference back to me via email? Nope, it just hands over to a web page in the browser - and that page is little more than contact details for the Wynn staff.
The only bit of functionality beyond "look! shiny!" in the application is the Video section, where, yes, you have more things to look at, but it's one of the few areas that let you get a good understanding of what the Wynn is like. It's a little harder to fake ambience in video than in pictures.
So the Wynn Las Vegas app feels very much like Las Vegas itself. Very shiny and attractive, but the second you look behind the gloss you can see a lot of scaffolding holding everything up, wondering if there is any more to it, and finding out the answer is no. Still, if App Stores are the new search engines, that explains the reasoning behind the Wynn app, otherwise I can't think why this has been put out with minimal effort.
And in the entire app, I never saw them refer to a Casino table even once.
-- Ewan Spence, July 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at