Yelp (Free)
REVIEW – “Need gas soon? Don’t just call for help, Yelp!”
This app was developed to bring the social networking site, yelp.com, directly to your iPhone. The app’s interface is pretty simple for the most part, but still allows you to access all of the necessary features of the site.
Yelp.com is a social networking site that helps people get reviews on different kinds of businesses such as banks, restaurants and bars. The idea is that anytime you visit somewhere, you open this app up, log in a review it. You are then able to view your review on the place, as well as the reviews of other people.
When you open up the app, the first thing you are asked to do is either login, or create an account if you don’t already have one. You can still view reviews without logging in, but you will be unable to add friends and send in your own reviews without an account.
Once you are logged in you are taken to the “Nearby” page. On this page you will see a list of different kinds of places that you might want to look up reviews and/or directions on. If you select a category, such as restaurants, it will automatically take you to the search page and search for nearby restaurants, listing them in order of which are closer to your current location.
In the upper left corner is the “filter” button, which will allow you to filter the results in several different ways including “Open Now”. This allows you to see only businesses that are open at the current time. If you look in the upper right corner you will see a “Map” button which will allow you to view your current list of locations on an integrated Google Maps page. Even this feature in itself is flawed though because you cannot zoom in or out on the map. This makes it nearly impossible to select the locations that you want if there are a lot of locations close together.
I like the idea behind this program; the problem is that unless you have mass adoption by the people in your area there are very few reviews of anything. And even that would be acceptable if all of the information in the app was at least moderately reliable. Unfortunately when I searched for “Restaurants within 5 miles that are open” I got no results, even though I know that there are at least 10 fast food restaurants within 5 miles of my house that were all open. And this is not the only instance I came across where the information seemed inaccurate and/or incomplete.
As much as I wanted this app to be a great resource, the support is just not there. It would have to be much more widely adopted on multiple platforms before this app could ever become useful. And I don’t believe it will ever be massively adopted unless the creators of this app find some way to get more accurate information for the businesses that it indexes. So unfortunately, as much as I would love to be able to recommend this app, it just does not perform the tasks that it was designed for well.
- David H.
Download Now!
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Developer – Yelp Inc.
URL:
http://www.yelp.com
DEVELOPERS NOTES
Looking for a burrito joint open now? An Irish pub nearby? A bas station you can drive to before your tank hits empty? Yelp for your iPhone is here to help. Use us to search for places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play then read reviews from an active community of locals in the know.
FEATURES:
Search for businesses near you using the iPhone’s built-in location finder
- Tap quick links to find nearby bars, restaurants, cafes and more
- Narrow your searches by ‘hood, distance, price, and what’s open now
- Browse reviews to read what’s great (and not so great) in your city
- Add Quick Tips, photos, and draft reviews for your favorite businesses
- Look up addresses and phone numbers for thousands of businesses, then cal lor map them from your iPhone
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