The Download Blog

Don't worry, you can always write your own.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

The original Yelp for iPhone was a skeleton of its online self when it first debuted. Since then, Yelp has been layering on the muscle. The improvements in Yelp for iPhone 3.0 plump the app even more, bringing both important functionality from the Web version and some mobile-friendly enhancements.

Deal-seekers will notice a new category in the Nearby search screen for sales and other offers, listing happy hour deals, coupons, an even specials just for Yelpers. (Ooh, free beverages at the 4.5-star Creperie Saint Germain!) This makes a lot of sense in a mobile app, and could help Yelp boost revenue sales if this form of location-based mobile advertising catches on with Yelp's community. Registering offers through Yelp is currently free for businesses.

Frequent Yelpers will also appreciate the ability to mark reviews as useful, funny, and cool, just like you can online. Compliments have also arrived from the online version, letting you give a reviewer additional kudos. If the suggested text is too cheesy for your tastes, you can clear it or add your own.

Movable maps are another addition. Instead of seeing a static image when you click to map a business, Yelp presents you with a map you can scroll with your finger. If you've searched and then scrolled around, the button "Redo Search Here" will apply your search terms (like special offers) to the new location.

There are more welcome changes beyond these community features. Yelp has finally (finally!) integrated a browser into its app--no longer will tapping a business' URL kick you out of the app and over to the Safari browser. If you misspell a word (and completely ignore search suggestions,) Yelp 3.0 will pop up a notification within the app to ask if you meant "restaurant" instead of "restarant." Yelp has also heeded user requests (ours included) to be able to e-mail a business' details and Yelp.com page URL to a buddy. This will help facilitate lunch and dinner invites.

Combined, these changes add up to a familiar, useful, and full-featured tool for on-the-go business-seekers. The major lasting complaint we have is that Yelp still offers only hacks for composing reviews, not a straightforward solution to write freely as you would online.

Yelp for iPhone 3.0 is available for free from the iTunes app store. You can also get started downloading it via your computer from Download.com.

Still holding back on downloading Yelp for the iPhone and iPod Touch? Refrain no longer. Version 2.0 adds two significant features that put the mobile version of the online rating service back on the map--activity feeds and two ways to submit modified ratings and reviews. Still, Yelp 2.0 is not without at least one very large hole. Find out where it scores and where it misses the mark in this First Look video.

Yelp introduces two ways to voice your opinion on iPhone.

(Credit: CNET)

I was lukewarm about Yelp's initial iPhone application, but some new features stitched into Yelp for iPhone 2.0 (and iPod Touch) this week are beginning to stoke my affections.

High on the list of Yelpers' demands was being able to write a review from the iPhone. In addition to any technical impediment Yelp may have experienced here is the fact that typing long missives, praises, and rants on the iPhone's virtual keyboard just plain stinks. To work around this, Yelp now gives you two ways to review a business. The first is through a Quick Tip, where you're encouraged to be pithy above all else. A 140 character cap holds you to it.

If budding novelists don't find that fulfilling, there's also way to draft a review on the iPhone--that includes the star rating--and finish it on the computer. While that's not a terrible method, the bottom line is that you're still not allowed to post a rated review from your iPhone. If I've got an hour to kill and I want to spend it stabbing out a Yelp review on my keyboard, that should be my business.

In addition to review-flavored changes, Yelp for iPhone also acquires a feeds list that aggregates the latest reviews, quick tips, and photos located near you. If you're signed on to your Yelp.com account, separate filters show you friends' feeds and your own activity history, including how people voted on your witty tips.

You can start a new review on Yelp for iPhone, but you can't post it.

(Credit: CNET)

Subtler improvements to the app include a sign-up process for first-time Yelpers, a new way to view photos of a business in full-screen mode, and localized spelling and address formatting for British users. I'm still a little miffed that I can't rate and review a restaurant on the spot, but this pack of changes makes the app much more usable than it was before. Since Yelp for iPhone is free and mass opinion isn't a bad jumping-off point, that makes this update a success in my book.

Related: Yelp: Businesses may publicly respond to reviews

A look at the new 'Nearby' feed on Yelp's iPhone app.

(Credit: Yelp)

A full five percent of reviews site Yelp's traffic comes from its downloadable iPhone app, the company said Thursday. In response, it's revamping the iPhone app, originally launched last year, to add new features that place a fresh emphasis on location awareness. The new download will be available in the iTunes App Store in a few days.

The most significant upgrades are the ability to post 140-character (read: Twitter-length) "quick tips" from the iPhone, a wholly new feature, which other members can give a Digg-like thumbs-up to. Popular ones may eventually be displayed on that business' review page on Yelp. Also new is a "Nearby" feed of what's accessible and recommended around you, as well as from your friends on the service. Yelp's original iPhone app had been juiced up with location awareness, but was light on the features--you could find out what was nearby and see what reviews had to say about it, but little else.

One more new feature: you can't publish full Yelp reviews from the revamped iPhone app but can draft them there and publish from its PC interface later.

The new app from Yelp comes just days after News Corp.'s MySpace announced a potentially strong rival to Yelp. Called MySpace Local, it's in partnership with the IAC-owned Citysearch--which is still the biggest name in business reviews. While MySpace Local doesn't have a mobile strategy in place, yet, it's on the road map.

And it's probably just a coincidence, but the new Yelp app's Twitter-like "tips" are a diversion from the five star scale of reviews that made Yelp famous, and which recently have been coming under scrutiny by some businesses who claim they get gamed in order to draw in new advertisers.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In this day and age when every other person is a self-described foodie, finding the best mobile application to point you to a taste bud-bending experience requires as much discernment as finding the authentic voice from among throngs of folks who think they know good eats.

I'd be lying if I didn't claim snobby epicurean tendencies, myself.

This headstrong belief in one's own taste credentials is exactly what fuels the need for informative and well-designed food-finding applications. Too simple and a foodie will shun it. Too esoteric and it could alienate a growing segment of people who really care about the art and science of meal-making.

I've recently studied several restaurant-recommending applications for iPhone and other mobile platforms, including Yelp and Urbanspoon for iPhone and Zagat To Go for Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry, and wondered how relative newcomers Munch ($0.99) and LocalEats ($0.99) compare to these more established services.

Munch for iPhone turns out accurate results, but what's with the ratings?

(Credit: CNET Networks)

There are, of course, things to laud and criticize with each app. Munch's interface has a great method for quick-launching searches for pizza, Mexican, and so on from icons in the screen navigation. You can select other cuisines from a scrolling list. Munch returns wonderfully accurate search results, but is devoid of context. There are no reviews, no Web site listings, and every restaurant we looked at was rated with five empty stars. That's doable if you want a listings app, but for anyone trying to make intelligent choices, it just won't work.

LocalEats fares much better. The app brings you the best 100 (or more) restaurants in 50 U.S. cities as determined by a team of foodie professionals, authors of the online dining guide Where the locals eat. The benefit is that unlike Urbanspoon, no national chain even thinks of making an appearance. You can search each city's highest-rated establishments by alphabetical order, cuisine type, or the best of each category. For larger cities you can also search by neighborhood.

Yelp and Where are two free location-finding iPhone applications that take vastly different approaches to direct you to what you're looking for.

While my personal preferences anoint Yelp for iPhone (review) the better service for its broader and more objective listings, Where for iPhone's (coverage) plotting of only partnered services will also have its cluster of followers. The bottom line is this: though serviceable, they both need work. Yelp's developers should hone the accuracy and breadth of this application's listings and stabilize performance against crashes. Where would benefit from letting users customize their choices by selecting or rejecting services from a longer list of location-aware partners.

See the particular take of each app in the video above.

Yelp on the iPhone maps and calls destinations and provides user ratings, but leaves off other social-networking elements.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Yelp for iPhone contains all the ingredients you'd expect from the well-known site for users to rate local business and restaurant listings--except one. It has a perplexing tendency to space out when loading user reviews. The instability is surely an early bug, but a detraction nonetheless.

Apart from that, Yelp for iPhone features a clear display composed of category listings for nearby restaurants, bars, banks, and so on. Like so many of the other apps that CNET editors have reviewed, Yelp's iPhone offering taps into the phone's GPS receptors to find matching listings in your neighborhood, with further parameters on distance and hours available in the button marked Filter.

Each listing on the results page squeezes in the address, user ratings, distance, and price range. Drilling deeper spreads the information out in a format that lets you map the location, click to call, begin browsing through user reviews, and bookmark the page.

Yelp.com is a data-intensive site bulging with user opinions and social-networking addenda. The iPhone app was clearly never intended as a replacement, but as a companion for the lost or weary to seek out a bike shop or bite to eat. That much is evident by the read-only quality, mobile-specific mapping and call functions, and the de-emphasis on social networking. Still, while the closed, self-centeredness of Yelp for iPhone is somewhat refreshing, certain scheduling capabilities would be welcome--like the ability to invite a friend to lunch.

If I had to describe LightPole in 10 words or fewer, I'd call it an interface for accessing location-aware services from mobile phones. More than anything else, LightPole's downloadable application offers a listings and mapping format that many location-based services, such as Yelp and Yahoo Local, can squeeze into to gain more visibility or avoid creating their own rich cell phone applications.

I added the CNET News.com channel; the rest are LightPole's.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It works like this. Users looking for stuff--a good restaurant, happy hour specials, or Internet cafe--can click open LightPole, select a service (MappyHour and Hotspotr are two more,) and can read about the establishment, call the establishment, and map the results.

New customization features, announced Wednesday, make the application heaps more appealing to the masses because it lets users do what users like to do best--add their own content by creating channels online.

From LightPole's Web site, you input any RSS feed or site URL corresponding to geotagged content into the blank field to transform it into a channel. A Google map and Flickr stream are two examples. A few more clicks and a manual phone update later and the content is ready to access. I'll admit that mapping the CNET News.com feed was a little useless (CNET headquarters doesn't move around much,) but I like the flexibility and relative ease of relying on LightPole's partnerships for my most-wanted content.

Two other announcements join ranks with the news of the now-open channels. LightPole's integration with Yahoo-owned Fire Eagle, a nexus for managing your location information. This integration lets registered users of other Fire Eagle-supported location services, Loki for example, post their whereabouts. LightPole will pick it up from there.

In a final enhancement, two of LightPole's partners, MappyHour and Hotspotr, have added functionality that lets users add favorite happy hour lairs and Internet cafes to the communities' Web sites from the LightPole application. There are still some usability hitches (a few too many menus and clicks for my taste,) but these second helpings already make LightPole more useful.

LightPole doesn't think of itself as a search hub, an RSS reader, a mobile apps platform, or a maps source, even though the mobile app, publicly released on Tuesday, is all these things rolled into one.

LightPole's interface is a bit like Viigo's, but instead of hosting various news channels, LightPole (mostly) hosts channels for interactive services, targeting people on the move who are looking for activities around them.

People seeking a nearby hot spot, for example, would open the channel for Hotspotr, which sniffs out W-iFi cafes and other Internet gateways. MappyHour acts similarly for happy hour joints, and Zvents offers listings of local happenings. Perennial favorites Yelp and Yahoo Local are in here, too. LightPole will search your neighborhhood based on your city or postal code, or by using GPS--whether integrated with the phone or as an external device.

Though dealing with divergent channels, LightPole serves up a unified experience, providing both a map view and list view for each search result. People can exert a measure of control over each view, but largely remain passengers. There's the ability to page through options, sort results, share points of interest with a friend, and switch services--from MappyHour to Yelp, for instance--but you'll find no directions engine here. If you follow LightPole's intentions, you'll stick to the adjacent neighborhood and be proficient enough a map-reader to get around.

Saving a point of interest as a favorite leads to the best feature: the catalog of special spots that is your own personalized channel. On LightPole's channel list, it's called My Places. Here you'll find favorites from all partner services gathered in one spot. Best yet, My Places is the only channel that doesn't include an advertising link up top. The location-based advertising model is common for this type of discovery service aggregator, and, as LightPole CEO Doug Klein confirmed, is an ideal framework for serving call-to-action coupons and ads that help businesses attract patrons by proposing a deal.

With its first public release after a year in quiet beta, LightPole's free app looks promising. While not swimming in features, LightPole is fairly easy to use on any Java-enabled phone and delivers reliably predictable results.

With an emphasis on helping content publishers get in front of users, LightPole should also be able to line up more popular partner services. This, along with giving users a degree more control in programming and deleting relevant channels, is crucial as LightPole expands its partner base. While Yelp and Yahoo Local are big wins, other partnerships such as one with The Bathroom Diaries will fall short in shepherding critical mass.

Download LightPole over the air by signing up on www.lightpole.net.

LightPole's navigational secrets
To zoom in while in map mode, press the center key and jog or scroll the center control to the left. Jog it to the right to zoom out. To reset your location, which is represented on a map by a red balloon, pressing the star key (*) will let the balloon follow your navigation to anywhere else on the map. Press the center key again to make the location your new nerve center.