UrbanSpoon shakes your iPhone 3G for restaurant reviews

Here’s a very good idea to make use the iPhone’s famous accelerometer feature, it doesn’t has to always be used for gaming, but instead it is used for viewing random restaurant reviews.

Do I say random? Yup, that’s the catch from UrbanSpoon; a web service that features restaurant reviews from critics, food bloggers and the general public. Urbanspoon’s iPhone implementation lets users shake the iPhone for a random restaurant pick. The software relies on the iPhone’s location finding — including GPS on Apple’s newly introduced iPhone model - to find a restaurant in your area.

“We wanted to take advantage of the physicality of the iPhone, so we’re using the accelerometer,” said Urbanspoon co-founder Ethan Lowry. “So we’ve developed an application for the iPhone that’s part slot machine, part Magic 8-Ball.”

The software relies on the iPhone’s location finding — including GPS on Apple’s newly introduced iPhone model - to find a restaurant in your area. Users can, of course, narrow their selections or select a restaurant manually, based on criteria like type of food, location and price. So far Urbanspoon includes restaurant listings in 41 major markets throughout the United States and Canada.
It does sound very fun and kinda gambling, if I may say. And even Lowry said the same thing: “The iPhone is toy-like and fun — it’s the opposite of the BlackBerry that way, so we wanted an application to match it.”

A very fine app for your iPhone indeed, because it’s using the iPhone’s accelerometer and the GPS function at the same time. Your $199 money will be well spent on the new iPhone 3G. Ooops, yes that would means you’ll have to wait till July 11th to get both the handset first; and they’ll be releasing the UrbanSpoon-iPhone application on the App Store in July for free that will tie in to the web service.

But in the mean time, you can go visit UrbanSpoon Mobile or go directly to this URL for an early try-out of the free web service. Hey, it’s free after all. Sources from UrbanSpoon, via Macworld.

[blogged with my Treo 750v]