Poynt review

The Poynt iPhone app points you in the right direction to find businesses, people, movies, restaurants, gas, events, and special offers with well-executed interface and navigation. You can find clear lists of restaurants running promotions on restaurants.com, as well as an accountant’s ratings and contact information to assist you with your taxes.

The Poynt iPhone app requires an authorization to activate location services to function at its highest level, and you will quickly be greeted by a bright, cheerful home screen. The home screen has an attractive graphic of a city in the background. The background changes to reflect your local weather. On this rainy day, the background darkened slightly and rain drops obscured the city view. It reminded me of looking through a traffic camera during rain on the local news. The categories are listed in a matrix grid on the home screen. You simply touch a category, and you move to a new screen to search for results.

Each category’s search interface operates virtually the same, but the filters may change slightly to complement the content. For example, you can search for restaurants by closest proximity to you or by cuisine. When you search for a person, you can search by name, phone, or address. There is generally a search bar, so you can enter a manual search. Or, you just touch the field with the sort mechanism you want to use. A list of selections is generated, and you can see the source for the information during the load time of the list. For example, the business search is powered by Super Pages, and the restaurant search is courtesy of opentable.com, City Search, and Super Pages. A list may contain the sponsored business or restaurant at the top of the list, but the list is generally sorted by those closest to your physical location. The list is concise, and it will generally have the name, ratings when available, and distance.

You touch each item for a more in-depth description and other options. For a movie theater, you touch the theater and view the list of movies. With a touch on a movie, you can find out about the plot, ratings, and times available. The Poynt iPhone app supports purchase of tickets in some situations, but not all. For gas, you can search for the nearest station or the best price. A list of gas stations will tell you the name, address, and current price of regular gas. With a touch on the gas station, you will find all prices available and time since the price was updated. You can call, as well as get directions.

The Poynt iPhone app incorporates two neat features that enhance the user experience. If you search for an event and identify a concert you want to attend, you can switch the location services to the location of the concert. Then, you can search for a restaurant near that location. Since you gradually unfold information by moving through several screens, there is a tendency among iOS developers to forget to include an escape hatch to the home screen. With the Poynt iPhone app, you can always touch the logo in the lower right hand of the screen to go back to home.

The Poynt iPhone app still has a weakness in its reliance on less influential and thorough sources like Super Pages. The opentable.com is a nice tool for restaurants, but it needs an additional resource for business search.

In the pursuit of creating a free local search iPhone app, the Poynt iPhone app is moving in a positive direction. The advertising isn’t intrusive, and the graphics are solid.