Urbanspoon iPhone Application

The newest application I've tried for the iPhone 3G is Urbanspoon. Urbanspoon is designed to find restaurants near you. It uses a graphic interface similar to a slot machine. Based on your location, it will find nearby cities, and a diverse pool of restaurants to choose from. The search fields are city, type, and price range. You simply enter your location, shake your phone to start the "slot machine" style search, and it will find you a restaurant. The 3 criteria spin until they land on something. You can make one constant by "locking" that field and the other 2 will spin until they find something.

It actually has been very useful this last weekend as I was looking to find some restaurants that I hadn't been to before. I was able to find a lot of restaurants I hadn't heard of that had great reviews. Urbanspoon also lists recent reviews to the restaurants it finds. The best part I think, is that you can search by price range. I personally like to have a good idea of what things cost before entering the restaurant.

iPhone Application Ads

For those of you iPhone users, I'm sure you've noticed your applications are being updated rapidly. That's because they are incorporating advertisements to your favorite iPhone apps like Bloomberg and Pandora internet radio. Sportacular is the only iPhone app that I have which hasn't been updated to display unwanted advertisements. Now all of these apps are free so we can't be too picky. However, if they start to make the iPhone run slowly, or have any sort of problems, they'll need to remove the unwanted application ads.

Spotacular's most recent update made the application better without the advertisments. You can now make a list of your favorite teams which displays their scores on the front page of the app. Sportacular is definitely one of the better apps and I appreciate them not following the new trend of iPhone apps putting banner ads on my phone.