Urbanspoon

Michael (Admin) | Aug 5, 2008 Travel

User rating:

(7 votes, average: 2.43 out of 5)

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The Find-Me-Some-Grub market in the App Store is pretty crowded as we all know, so it’s cool to see new concepts like Urbanspoon. You don’t have to be a genius developer to take a keyword and location and spit out a list of restaurants – iPhone’s map function kind of does that by default already. Urbanspoon apparently realized this and devised a clever way of suggesting new places for you to chow down.

After finding your location, the first thing the app shows you is a set of slot-machine reels and all you have to do is shake your iPhone and watch the reels spin past neighborhoods, food types, and pricing until they land on something random. Nice! And you can lock certain reels if you definitely want to eat cheap or near home or whatever. It even makes a coin-dropping sound when your surprise eating destination is revealed and it keeps track of choices you’ve spun past just in case you change your mind.

If you like the restaurant Urbanspoon has chosen, you can tap through and get local reviews that tell you what percentage of people voted “I like it”. Tap the phone number to call them, tap the address and the iPhone’s GPS map launches.

So far, so good – it all makes sense. There is, however, one major problem in Urbanspoon… especially for those who don’t like surprises. When you choose to browse or search (as opposed to shake), not only do you get a static map, but you’re also teased with a “get directions” link which takes you to the full-size (read: not optimized for mobile) Google maps page. Dammit! Everything in the Shake part of the app was great, and now this. It’s almost like they made part of the app before iPhone’s GPS map existed, the other part after, and then they just released it anyway despite the obvious problem with search/browse.

If they can fix this major goof on the maps then I think the app would deserve four stars, and if they could find out a way to beef up their database of venues and user reviews I’d give it five stars in a heartbeat. Gotta fix that map thing, though. I hate saying this, but that just looks sloppy.