Description
Looking for a burrito joint open now? An Irish pub nearby? A gas 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 call or map them from your iPhone
- For 3GS owners: Yelp does augmented reality with the Yelp Monocle. Overlay business information onto the world around you
What's New in Version 4.1.0
- For the Lucky 3GS Owners: On business page maps, tap "Orient the Map" to magically orient the map to the direction you're facing.
- Checking in all over town? We'll now highlight the places you're a regular on your profile.
- Bug fixes! Speed improvements! Jet packs! (OK, no jet packs)
Customer Reviews
Easy to use but only very limited access to the goodness of Yelp.com
In case you don't know, Yelp is the best review site on the web for finding and choosing restaurants, shops and other businesses by location and rating, optionally filtered by many other criteria. Yelp users are very dedicated to providing in-depth and insightful reviews. Since Yelp users and the reviews they write are themselves rated, and since the Yelp community is both large and very healthy, the reviews and ratings are generally high quality and reliable, and provide comprehensive coverage of all the major metro areas.
This first version Yelp iPhone application uses the iPhone's location awareness to give you a quick list of what's near you, but you can only view the top 20 results. This would be fine if you could tell it whether you cared about proximity or higher ratings more, but you can't. You can't do category-based search as you can on Yelp.com, so when I searched for "pizza" only 1 out of the 5 results were for a pizza joint, though I did get better results when my search was "restaurants pizza". On the plus side you can filter by distance, price, neighborhood and whether it is "open now". You can't filter by the many other criteria supported on Yelp.com -- But that's okay since you want an iPhone app to be simple. Unfortunately the filters that are supported don't remember your settings, so you have to re-enter them each time you search.
On Yelp.com you can move the map view around to find more places in other parts of the map. Not possible on the iPhone Yelp.
There is no link to your Yelp account if you have one. This means that all the bookmarks you create on Yelp.com for restaurants you want to try don't synchronize to your iPhone and vice-versa. You cannot access your own reviews or lookup what your friends like. You also cannot write a review of a restaurant or other business on the spot, while it is still fresh in your mind and while you can conveniently include a photo taken with your iPhone.
This is a first version, so I fully expect Yelp to address most if not all of these shortcomings in the not too distant future. Maybe they'll come out with Yelp Pro. Until then, this is better than nothing.
Yelp still doesn't trust you
Ok, so by now most people probably know that Yelp is in the business of extortion: they remove negative reviews if businesses agree to pay them. Google search: "yelp" and "extortion". Class actions, articles detailing their dubious practices, etc. With this lame app Yelp continues in the same vein of not trusting the customer: you can't place a review from within the app, only write a draft, that is then awaiting confirmation on yelp.com--which can, of course, be accessed from an iPhone. Why do people have to go through this tedious step to post a review? Because Yelp corporate has decided for us that we can't be trusted to write a decent review from an iPhone. Yelp--we decide if your review is worthwhile. By the way... Thanks, Apple for letting me write this review from my iPhone. :)
Totally lame
A new 'BIG' update...? This app would score 5 stars if I didn't have to log into the actual site to approve my OWN review on a computer, kind of makes it a pointless to write a review on my phone, I think the reason you do this is to draw more traffic to the site, people would rather review whilst at the place being reviewed rather than 'approving' their own review when they return home. Other apps do it why can't Yelp allow it? devs?
- Free
- Category: Travel
- Updated: Mar 01, 2010
- Current Version: 4.1.0
- 4.7 MB
- Language: English
- Seller: Yelp, Inc.
- © Yelp, Inc 2010
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone and iPod touch. Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.
