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Category: Restaurant/hotel/entertainment reviews
Developer: Handmark, Inc.
Requirements: iPhone OS 2.2.1 software
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch
File Size: 0.7 MB
Version Reviewed: 2.2.002
Price: $9.99

In terms of travel and review guides, Zagat is a pretty big deal, and you can tell that even Apple thinks so; it’s been featured in commercials and, according to Zagat, is included on the demo iPhones/iPod touches (iPods touch?) in the Apple store to show that no matter where you travel, you can use these amazing devices and a well-respected ratings guide to find the best in eating, hotels, and entertainment.

Zagat To Go ‘09 (ZtG) is broken down simply enough, and takes obvious advantage of the geolocation feature; you can either let it detect where you are or tell it where you’d like to search. From there, you can find food and nightlife by neighborhood, price, reviewer recommendations, and a host of other options (including search criteria like having a business meeting or a date, hanging out with friends, or a celebration—and all these are broken down by subcategory, as well. In fact, there are so many submenus that I wondered if I was ever going to get an actual recommendation). No lie. Here’s one of the option trees:

Choose Metro Area > Chicago Metro > (With) Friends > (Situation?) Quick Bite > (Cost?) My Friends are Cheap > (Where to?) Anywhere that works > (Describe your experience) Just Meeting Up for Drinks.

This finally leads to the (one) recommendation of the Billy Goat Tavern. Seven submenus? You could starve to death.

The reviews themselves are an amalgamation of quotes by various reviewers, along with ratings according to food, decor, service, and cost. You’ll get, naturally, the address and phone number, hours, and website (which can be opened within the app). Strangely missing is the ability to open the street address in Maps. Also missing (more ridiculously) to copy the address to paste it into the Maps app yourself. You can easily email the review, but when you go back to ZtG, it doesn’t save the page you were on (though the “Recent” button at the bottom will save the reviews you’ve recently read).

But there’s no certainty that the recent info will be in the cache if you’re offline: after turning off the wireless capabilities of my iPod touch, Zagat was able to give me all the entries I had just checked. But when I tried it on the bus the next day, none of reviews for those locations came up—although it did list the address for the restaurant. The other problem is that while ZtG will instantly detect whether you’ve got an active internet connection, it will try to re-establish a link to its server with every selection you make, and take its own sweet time doing it—30 seconds of pointlessly trying to reach out of a network it knows it’s not connected to. So that means to go from start up to a “recent” entry can take more than a minute.

ZtG is an application for a traveller, specifically a business traveller who finds himself in major cities (and airports) who needs to find something quick and safe to charge to an expense account. Looking over my stomping grounds of Minneapolis/St. Paul (not, ahem, listed as a “major” location, by the way) I was a little surprised by their recommendations—they only list three restaurants for Uptown, one of which isn’t even in the area and miss most of the really good food all together. But this is not an insider’s guide, this is a guide for a stranger in a strange land, probably with an expense account. Fair enough.

And if I spent a lot of time traveling, I’d probably come to rely upon Zagat to give me an initial feel of the city, especially if I didn’t know any locals to clue me in. If you’re just in from the airport, maybe you don’t want to trudge all over San Francisco looking for the strange little hole in the wall with the great tapas. For people who find themselves in a strange town with an iPhone, it’s handy. For people with an iPod touch, you better have an active wireless signal and copy all the info before you head out.