Yelp is the restaurant review Website that gets the most use and makes the most noise. The iPhone Yelp app makes the site even better by allowing you to review a restaurant while you’re still sitting in it.

Have you even had a great meal and wished you could tell the world while the experience was still fresh in your mind? Or had such a rubbery piece of key lime pie that you needed to report it to the food police ASAP? Yelp is the perfect website for such reports, and the Yelp app makes the iPhone or iPod Touch the perfect devices for writing those reports, immediately, in situ.

Yelp is a free app at the Apple app store. Once downloaded and installed, the iPhone app will let you browse restaurants immediately to see what others think of them so that you can make better choices. In order to leave reviews of places that you have been, you will need to sign up for a Yelp account, either at the Yelp site on line or using your iPhone. You can draft reviews using your iPhone, but have to visit the Web site to publish them, which is a bit of a shortfall, although you can still do them on the spot. Still, the app should add the ability to let you publish reviews from your iPhone.

Like most iPhone apps, Yelp knows where you are via GPS, making it very easy to find places nearby. There is even a “Filter” page that allows you to set what you think is “nearby,” at increments between one/third of a mile and 20 miles. You can even set a price that you want to see, between “$” and “$$$$” and tell the app that you only want to see establishments that are open at that moment.

You are also not limited to restaurants. Yelp also accepts and publishes reviews for bars, coffee shops, banks, gas stations, drug stores, nightlife, pet services, and a plethora of other categories. Restaurants is just the most popular of these. Some of the reviews can be quite entertaining, so plan on spending some time reading up on the places you frequent.

The Yelp app has a social networking feature, via which you can find real life friends (or even new Yelp friends) with which to more closely share information. One of the ways to share is via the “feed” feature, which quickly shows you new reviews for places near you or by your friends. This last feature also makes it easy to find the most recent reviews that you have written.

The Yelp iPhone app makes it easy to find out what other people thought of the restaurants or other businesses that you are considering going to. It also allows you to put your two cents worth into the mix. Best of all, you can do all of this from the field, on the spur of the moment, without being home at your computer, using the iPhone or Touch that you keep in your purse or pocket. If the app developer would add the ability to publish results from the field, this app might be a best in class.

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Entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 1:11 pm under Free Apps, Review, iPhone, iPod Touch.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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