New Wings Internet Cafe

Disgraceful excuse for an internet café. Because I don’t enjoy the background noise that you get from free pub wifi i paid the rate at an internet café.
Because i brought my own laptop i had to sit at one particular spot. By the door where I was bumped by EVERYBODY walking past. A woman pushed past me with a screaming baby in a pram, and parks it directly behind me.
About half an hour in the owner puts on super loud middle eastern music from his pc. He called his friend over to take a look, fine. I figured it was a youtube video or something, I figured it will be gone soon, but it went on for AT LEAST an hour.
About 45 minutes in, absolutely fuming because I can hardly hear — even though I’m wearing headphones — I asked if there was somewhere else I could sit because I couldn’t hear my conversation. The manager looked at me with what I can only describe as contempt and says «no…you’re using your laptop, only there.» I almost headbutted him, but anyway. He turned the music down a bit (I’d say from 100% volume to around 95%) and eventually came over to interrupt my call again to say I could move if I wanted and I told him to forget it.
Eventually the screaming baby leaves (but not without the pram and the entire family bumping my chair on the way out) and the music was turned down.
I finish my skype call, go up to pay, and the robbing bastard charges me for 2.5 hours when I’ve been there for under two. For the sake of a pound I wasn’t going to challenge him, I just shook my head and told him I wouldn’t be back.

New Wings is an internet café conveniently placed in this central, student populated area of Edinburgh. It’s clean, airy and busy with people from all around the world checking their emails over a cup of tea.
I know that everyone owns fancy-​pants phones these days, and carry around their dinky wee laptops where they can fire up the internet and obtain free Wifi from just about everywhere. I, however, have an old brick of a laptop, a phone that barely receives picture messages and don’t live in Edinburgh, so this place is very useful to me when I want to do some Unilocaling on the go!
I hear what everyone’s saying about net café’s becoming swiftly outmoded, but if you are hostelling, visiting or even (heaven forbid) have lost your internet connection at home for a while, I would argue that they become very useful indeed. They are, in fact, like gold dust these days. So even though it’s 2 quid for an hour, you could do a lot, lot worse than New Wings. It’s clean, there are private booths for you to Skype in (or at least I hope that’s what you’re doing in there), there’s cake, and an abundance of tea served up from their friendly staff. This is my favourite internet café in Edinburgh, and I’m glad it exists since my Unilocaling would have to wait until I was back in Glasgow otherwise!

Come really early in the morning, roughly about half an hour after opening. It will astound you, the sheer numbers of old men looking up porn. Not even trying to hide it, even trying to get you look too!
For everyone else who’s using the internet for non-​pornographic reasons (all 7 of you), if you don’t already have internet this isn’t a bad place to check your e-​mail!

I dont see the point of this place. As Gavin pointed out, there is a waining need for places suchas new Wings, and you can kind of tell that this internet café is suffering. It’s still alright, but theres a heavy atmosphere in here like that of an animal who knows the vultures are circling.
Its slightly on the shabby side, and while the computers work well, they arent exactly the tip-​top machines you find in some places. Staff are nice enough, but generally once you have paid for your time they stay the hell away from you. I’m not a great frequenter of internet café’s so I’m not sure if this was the norm or not, but it wasnt pleasent.
I spent 25 minutes of my paid 1 hour here, before realising I could go home to use my much facter internet. And if I was really desperate to get my fix of innane gossip and viral videos, I could use my phone.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that the need for internet cafes is sadly disappearing. Even your common or garden Farmfoods shopper has an internet connection these days. When they’re not drinking heavily at taxpayers’ expense, they can be found «oan Bebo», where they often showcase horrendous spelling and grammar, and /​or their own peculiar language made up entirely from hearts and smiley faces.
The rapid growth of internet-​enabled mobiles would seemingly be another nail in the coffin of places like New Wings, but it still keeps busy, highlighting that there’s still a large section of the public prepared to leave home in order to look up pictures of skateboarding cats and utterly depraved, hardcore pornography.
A useful little shop that provides a good public service then. Mainly to students too stingy to get internet in their flat, heroin addicts too financially commited elsewhere, and immigrants waiting on the deportation truck.