iPhone: City Guide revisited

So I played around a little bit more with Washington Post’s City Guide iPhone application.

With the restaurant search, my most likely to be used function, I’m finding a serious lack of listings around me that I know exist but perhaps haven’t yet been reviewed by Post staff. Leaving off a restaurant right next to you because there’s no rating is a bit unhelpful and hardly comprehensive. I will say that at 5 bars of signal plus wi-fi, the app is functioning a lot better, but it doesn’t even list my favorite 4 restaurants right up Mt. Pleasant Street and its concept of “near” me listed a whole bunch of restaurants that might be near if I had a car or were willing to go through a moderate metro ride, like Capitol Hill… or Falls Church!? One of the frequent complaints of other venue finding applications was standing outside a perfectly good restaurant/bar and having the application locate places completely across town.

I would also appreciate a link to OpenTable for participating restaurants and not just a phone number button. I know I advocated phone calls earlier, but for restaurant reservations that often means either a “please hold” or leaving voicemail and awaiting a callback as likelihoods. OpenTable has a mobile site, so linking to it for a particular restaurant would be easy enough.

I’d say this application needs a little bit more work and I hope there are some updates coming after they’ve seen a little road testing from local users. And perhaps read reviews like this…? 😀