Yelp

By Brandon Carter Meixel on February 9th, 2009
Our Rating: :: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad

Yelp for iPhone is an amazingly feature packed, incredibly useful app for finding services and entertainment in your urban bubble. Need to find a cafe, restaurant, tire changing station, drug store, etc that’s approved by the community around it? Yelp is here to help! (I totally didn’t intend for that to rhyme and even though it’s lame, I’m leaving it in the review)

There are four sections of the Yelp app:

Nearby, Recents, Search, and Bookmarks

Nearby: Presents a list of familiar Yelp categories. With the help of location services, the app will display a list of stuff under that particular category that is nearby. There’s also the Hot on Yelp section underneath the categories, this reveals the most bookmarked places around you in the last month.

Recents: Keeps track of the last ten places you’ve viewed on Yelp. Pretty handy if you view something interesting but forget to bookmark it. That’s about all there is to say about that!

Search: Choosing a category in Nearby will jump you over to this section of the app, it reveals your query results. You can select any result and the app shows all the detailed information including average rating, price level, review preview, phone number, address, directions, the ability to add a photo or add to your bookmarks. You can expand any of these. For example, in the screenshots you’ll see the finer details of Rogue Ale, the full reviews, and the map of it’s location. If you want to narrow your search, you can use all of the handy filters that are available on Yelp’s website…so if I don’t want to spend this month’s rent on dinner, I can choose just $$ (dollar signs). Yelp has a built in map, but there’s a button that lets you jump into google maps straight from Yelp. You can touch through the reviews to disclose the full review instead of a preview, but the fun pretty much stops there – you can’t see the other reviews made by that particular Yelper or make any comments. You also can’t write your own reviews from the mobile app (sad face). You can, however, add photos directly from your camera or camera roll to the Yelp gallery, which is pretty cool and makes me feel like I’m able to contribute something on the go.

Bookmarks: This is the newest feature of the Yelp app. If you have an account on Yelp, you can now sign into it and access all of your bookmarks! This is super handy because sometimes I’ll walk by a restaurant or bar that is closed – and instead of relying on my not-exactly-sharp memory I can find it on Yelp and bookmark it to check out later. This is good for keeping track of places you’d like to review as well.

Conclusion: If you live in a city that has seemingly endless places to go, Yelp is very useful in finding what everyone else thinks are the diamonds in the rough. Plenty of times I’ve found myself wondering into a place without even standing room, and I’ve used Yelp to discover something cooler nearby that I could actually walk into! Hopefully the developers of the Yelp app will incorporate the most requested feature I’ve heard from multiple users of Yelp – the ability to write reviews directly from iPhone. Similar to my opinion of the Facebook app for iPhone, I think the Yelp app is much more desirable to use than the actual website – adding the review feature would assuredly cement this.

Yelp

Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Buy Now: FREE

Our Rating: :: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Read Our Full Review >>

Released: 2008-07-11 :: Category: Travel