iOS App of the Day: Yelp
Whenever I am out-of-town or in an unfamiliar area and need to find something, I always turn to Yelp for help. With just a few taps the Yelp app for iOS can quickly locate a nearby bar, restaurant, or business closest to your location with honest real-life user reviews. If you’re looking for honest opinions about local establishments, then the Yelp app is a must have app for your iPhone.
Pros:
- Provides most of the desktop site’s features
- Well designed UI, easy navigation
- Search for businesses near you
- 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
- Find great Deals offered by your favorite local businesses
- Add Quick Tips, photos, and draft reviews for your favorite businesses
- Check-in and share on Facebook and Twitter
- Make reservations on OpenTable without leaving the Yelp app
- Look up addresses and phone numbers for thousands of businesses, then call or map them from your iPhone
- Yelp does augmented reality with Monocle. Overlay business information onto the world around you.
Cons:
- App will not let you write a review, only a draft
How it works:
Once you download Yelp, you can sign in using a Yelp.com account or you can create an account to make dinner reservations, check-in, post tips, and draft reviews. The main dashboard categorizes the app’s features in a clean and well-designed user interface. Main features include restaurants, bars, coffee & tea, gas and service stations, drugstores, everything, deals, check-in offers, and hot new businesses. You can also tap on “more categories” to pull up an even broader list of search categories to browse with.
The icons on the bottom of the app allow you quick access to search locations nearby, deals, a manual search bar, bookmarks, and social features.
To search for something by category, tap the suitable category type and the app will pull up all locations that match that category nearby. For example, if I want to search for a bar I would tap on the bar icon and then scroll down through the results. The app provides 20 results per page with short descriptions and ratings of each listing. If you see one that you like simply tap on the description to learn more. The full description will display the establishment’s name, review rating, price, phone number, reader reviews, map directions, nearby restaurants, nightlife nearby, and business photos.
If you want to save a particular business listing for reference later you can tap on the bookmarks icon at the bottom to add a listing to your favorites.If you have a yelp.com account already, you can log in to sync your bookmarks.
Conclusion:
There are not many apps that I use on a consistent basis, but with Yelp I can’t help but use the app everyday. While the mobile app doesn’t allow you to actually post a user review, it does act as a successful business locator. The app’s well-defined categories, filters, and search functions make it easy to quickly find exactly what you are looking for. The best part of this app is that you can select which location has the best user ratings to ensure you are picking the best place to spend your hard-earned money. Try out Yelp for yourself and let us know what you think about the app in the comments below.
Yelp is available for free in the iTunes Store. Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.Requires iOS 4.0 or later. iTunes Link
This is part of our iOS App of the Day series. We take our favorite app for iOS for each day and post it here for you to check out. Feel free to check out all of our App of the Day posts here.
