Urbanspoon For iPad App

Urbanspoon For iPad App Review

Urbanspoon, one of the first apps ever developed for the iPhone is now available on the iPad. The popular restaurant suggestion app is almost an exact adaptation of it’s sister iPhone version. Except on the iPad, the extra screen real estate allows users to view a live-updating map in addition to the slot machine function. With Urbanspoon, find restaurants in your area and sort the listings by price, cuisine, or neighborhood. If you’re feeling spontaneous, simply hit the ‘spin’ button and Urbanspoon will randomly choose a restaurant for you.

Completely free for the iPad, the Urbanspoon app loads smoothly, experiences few crashes, and manages to help suggest restaraunts without bombarding you with advertisements or sponsored reviews.

The suggestion tool allows you to choose from three criterion: Neighborhood (you can go broad by selecting a nearby city), price range, and type of cuisine. Tap the padlock icon and lock any particular features if you want to limit the randomness of the suggestions. Once you’ve selected and applied your preferences, all matching restaurants pop up as thumb-acks on the Google Maps display below the spinner. Tap a restaurant on the map and a detailed popup loads with the restaraunts address, phone number, local reviews, and user reviews. For even more information, click the ‘details’ link and the restaurant’s Urbanspoon.com profile page will load in an in-app browser.

While Urbanspoon is great for suggesting where to eat, the app is missing some desirable features. For instance, it would great to let you use user reviews as a filter. Secondly, once you find your restaraunt, there’s no integration for you to actually map out directions from where you are. Instead if you want directions, you’d have to copy the address and load the Maps app to find out how to actually find the restaurant. This seems like an easy feature to add since Google Maps is already a part of the app. For now, I can only hope these features will come with the next update to the app.

All-in-all, Urbanspoon is still a great app for finding nearby eats. Use the app freely without excessive advertisements or overly biased reviews. Just a few new features would make Urbanspoon a killer app, but the current version isn’t to shabby itself.