I live literally immediately across the street from this hotel - so close that you can't even see my building from the rooftop shot in the post because it's blocked by the lip of the roof deck.
It's an interesting location because Canal Street creates a sort of noisy, rough-around-the-edges chasm directly between high rent soho and tribeca. I can understand people first checking in to the property to be a little underwhelmed, with all the truck and bus traffic and bootleg DVD salesmen.
Having said that, it is an incredibly convenient location (and that's why it's so close to so many trendier hotels - the soho grand, the james, and the tribeca grand are all just about a block away, and within a 5 block radius you've also got 60 Thompson, the Mercer Hotel, and too many others to count). You're a very, very short walk away from some of the best shopping and restaurants in the city, and you're near express stops on every useful subway line.
An earlier commenter said the location is more like Chinatown - I don't think that's entirely accurate. While Chinese owners run many of the shops immediately on canal even this far west, you're really not particularly near the central Chinatown restaurant / shopping corridors - you'd have to go halfway across the island to the east to get there, though it'd get progressively more "Chinatownish" the further east you went from the hotel.
My big concern with staying here would be the noise - our apartment gets pretty loud at a few key moments during the day: early in the morning (5-6ish) when there tends to be heavy truck traffic, during the evening "rush" (which varies from very short on Mondays-Wednesdays to more or less all afternoon and well into the night on weekends). The rooms in the front probably have the best view but unless you're on a high floor and they've done a good job with the soundproofing I'd think asking for the sides or back if you're not a deep sleeper.
I obviously can't comment on the property itself because I have no reason to stay there 🙂