SPOTLIGHTm

Part slot machine, part restaurant finder

Urbanspoon for iPhone

What is it?

Urbanspoon is a restaurant-centric utility and community that gathers user reviews and pulls in reviews from CitySearch and relevant local area magazines and websites to help users find a place to eat. Separated by neighborhood and type of cuisine, the site mixes professional reviews with user-generated opinions on area restaurants.

How much does it cost?

Free.

Who is it good for?

Adventurous eaters looking for the cure for the common meal and have some patience to find a restaurant by using the application. Urbanspoon is not necessarily tops when it comes to total volume of reviews, but it can be a fun (AKA: not the best) way to find a new place in your area.

Summary

With a confusing user ratings system (+77% versus -48%) and limited review data that doesn’t surface restaurant ratings for many, Urbanspoon’s ratings database feels sparse when compared to Yelp’s. Despite its fun, slot machine-like random restaurant generator gimmick that is fun waste of time and upload capabilities for registered users, Urbanspoon’s limited available data and needless turning of pages limits its usefulness for the casual on-the-go restaurant goer.

Keep it or Delete it?

Delete it.

As its name suggests, Urbanspoon is for “city folk” looking to find a place to chow down. From five star steakhouses and French bistros to McDonald’s and neighborhood sandwich shops, Urbanspoon gathers professional reviews on the local feeding troughs and allows users to vote “I Like It” or “I Don’t” on various locations.

Simple in theory, but the experience is not nearly as pleasant on the iPhone.

The main problem is that even in urban areas where people are more likely to rate their favorite watering holes and feeding troughs, there are simply not enough reviews within Urbanspoon to get an accurate rating on-the-go and many of the links to external reviews are either useless or broken.

Chances are that you use your iPhone’s GPS to try and find restaurants nearby by using the “Near Me” tool on the lower right corner of the application. Not only are you trying to find a restaurant, but you’d really prefer to find a good restaurant.

The problem is that when you tap “Near Me,” there’s a good chance that you’ll find that half (or more) of the restaurants don’t have a number rating associated with them because not enough users have said they either “Like” or “Don’t Like” them.

Say what you will about having a binary system to rate restaurants (I feel like many of us think that there are restaurants we’d say are “decent,” not that we “like” or “don’t like” them), but the fact that there are legitimately a good number of restaurants that surface with little to no data makes the “Near Me” function a disappointment, especially when compared to Yelp.

Similarly, when using the “Browse” function, which allows a user to search by neighborhood and type of food, the returned results are often underwhelming because of their inability to provide some legitimate hidden gems for your demanding palate. And even when restaurants have not been rated, a few too many restaurants have been “Rated a 7.0/10″ by CitySearch, with no explanation or review to tell you why you should go there.

Fills in restaurant names as you type - a small bright spot

So clearly, there is a lot not to like about Urbanspoon’s iPhone offering, but there is some good. We promise. Not a lot, but it’s there.

Predictive text within search can be extremely helpful if you don’t exactly remember that Italian restaurant’s name from the other day. With just a couple letters, Urbanspoon surfaces restaurant names that contain that text (either in the beginning, middle, or end), which might not make searching faster, but it could potentially be helpful when you’ve nodded your head after someone said “You have to try Mer…*unintelligible fast talking*…’s! It’s the best Carribean food ever!”

Next, Urbanspoon also allows its first-time iPhone users to not only register for the site via their phone through a quick and painless process, but they can contribute to the site as well.

Through reviews, photos, and “I Like/Don’t,” the iPhone application for Urbanspoon actually becomes a tremendous resource for the site to build out their content. Unlike Yelp’s iPhone offering, which is currently a “read-only” proposition, Urbanspoon gives users the opportunity to participate with the site in a more “read/write” fashion.

For users who are participating Urbanspooners, this saves a trip to the computer and makes it easier for them to participate in the community. And of course, for Urbanspoon, they are getting more free content from their users in the form of ratings, comments, and pictures from the various locations.

Good for the user, better for Urbanspoon

Through the application, Urbanspoon faces a bit of a chicken/egg dilemma, even more than Yelp. With a limited database, the application doesn’t appear nearly as robust and complete as it should.

However, by empowering users to rate restaurants and give on the spot reviews, Urbanspoon gives users the capability to make this database worthwhile by having them contribute the reviews and content that can fill out the application.

Are there better applications out there to find restaurants? Yes, there are.

However, depending on your home location and number of active users in your area, Urbanspoon could be just as valuable as Yelp, but there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to find a better restaurant app out there to help with your restaurant discovery.

For us, we found the needless page turns due to the organization of restaurants by neighborhood and limited number of listed locations to feel disorganized when compared to other slick iPhone discovery applications.

The review system could end up being good, but with so many restaurants not showing data off the bat because of a lack of critical mass participating in the service, we think you can do better than Urbanspoon.