App Aims: Finding Great Places To Eat, Dance and Stay

Reviewer’s Comments
Zagat to Go ‘09 is a simple-to-use app that lets you quickly and easily change your location and search for restaurants, nightlife and hotels that have Zagat reviews. There is also other information such as location, phone numbers, website addresses, hours of operation and features. However, keep in mind that all of this information requires access to the Internet, so it’s usefulness on the iPod touch is somewhat limited.

We tested this app for the city of New Orleans, since this reviewer has been there quite a few times. The first thing we noticed is that not all restaurants are included, likely because not all restaurants have Zagat reviews. We also found it difficult to find a few of the hotels that we know exist but are not sure about the location of or the exact name of, the search and location functions are limited. For example, we could easily find hotels around the business center or convention area, such as the Doubletree, the Crowne Plaza and the Westin but had a harder time finding more out-of-the-way places like The Drury and you can’t look for hotels on the trolley line for example.

Although we found this app useful, for $9.99 we would like to see it be more inclusive. The developers could combine the Zagat to Go ‘09 features with one of the navigation apps, so it could include businesses that haven’t been reviewed, so at least you can find them. We would also like the search feature to work a little more intelligently. For example, we searched for “gumbo” and it only came back with one restaurant with gumbo in its name but not a list of restaurants that feature gumbo on its menu.

Basically this app just does a good job of providing Zagat reviews; however, there are many free apps out there that include a more comprehensive list of businesses and services. Check out our iPhone 3G review, music and movie download reviews as well as our other iPhone App reviews to help you get the most out of your iPhone.