Localicious – Location Based App to Find Interests Near You, but Needs to Bake Longer
by Jonathan Lonczak
Aug 10, 2011 8:37 AM –
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Localicious. What’s Good in the Hood. Instantly find trending businesses in any neighborhood. Real-time tips and trends allow you to quickly and decide where to eat, shop or even get your car’s oil changed.
Price: Free
Tested on: HTC Droid Incredible 2, Sony Xperia Play
Content Rating: Medium Maturity
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Excellent interface that is easy to use and as visually appealing as many of its competitors.
- Location-based business suggestions and search by categories and keywords.
- FourSquare integration for restaurant check-ins and reviews.
- Native user reviews.
Cons
- Less reviews than many competitors.
- No food types listed with business.
- No restaurant pricing information.
- No menu information
- FourSquare check-ins work at very limited locations.
Features:
Localicious is a location based application similar to Yelp or Poynt. Localicious allows you to search for locations by category or keyword near your GPS location, provides user reviews for various locations, integrates with FourSquare to provide a larger reviewer base, and shows tips at locations near your GPS location.
This is a simple application, the main screen to is very similar to that of FourSquare. It displays the businesses closest to your GPS location and gives you the option to search through the indexed businesses by keyword or category in the area by your current location. In order to search for Thai restaurants in my area all I needed to do was type in “Thai” as the keyword and then hit go. Likewise if you were looking for Italian restaurants you would type in “Italian” and repeat the same process.
After performing a search for a specific type of location you are presented a list of relevant search results which are sorted based on their distance from your phone. Each of the search results provide more detailed information when they are opened up. This includes address, contact number, user reviews, and reviews from FourSquare. You will be able to see user ratings, but unfortunately there are no further classifications for local eateries. Localicious does not include price ranges, type of dining, or hours of operation in its business listings.
The FourSquare reviews are a nice touch and allow you to get a greater number of reviews for various locations than just those reviews done through Localicious. A few locations also allow for automatic check-in through FourSquare upon your arrival at that specific location. However, not every location supports this feature and many of the FourSquare tips are not detailed reviews like on competitors Yelp and Google Places.
Finally, on the Localicious home screen the application will scroll through tips near your current GPS location. This is one of my favorite features of the application, because occasionally you will see a tip near you of interest at a location you otherwise would have never visited. These tips are all generated through the apps Facebook integration.
Watch on Mobile
Watch on Mobile
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Localicious Main Screen
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Localicious Restaurant
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Localicious Bar Info
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Localicious Reviews
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Localicious Search Results
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Localicious Search History
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Localicious Settings
Usefulness:
I did not find Localicious to be an extremely useful application. The reason that it is not an application I would regularly use and many of its competitors do the same kind of thing, but do it better and have a larger user base. The main thing this application has going for it is the FourSquare support, but the integration is not as thorough as would be needed in order to make it one I would use again.
Ease of Use:
Localicious is extremely easy to use. In order to find local businesses you merely need to type in the type of business or a keyword in the business name. The FourSquare integration is automatic as well so there is no set up to be done and no learning curve.
Frequently Used:
I would not use this application again unless the developers incorporated more information about the businesses in their directory. A location based application for finding restaurants and other business should incorporate more basic information about the business than just the address and phone number with reviews from another independent application. Instead it should have its own internal system of review for users to interact with in my opinion.
Interface:
The interface for Localicious is very straightforward and easy to use. On the whole I was very pleased with the look and feel of the application, but I was deterred from reusing it due to its lack of competitive features when compared to other mobile applications like Yelp and Google Places.
Tags:
Android App,
AndroidTapp.com App Review,
Foursquare,
Local,
Localicious,
Location Based,
poynt,
Restaraunts,
User Reviews,
white pages,
whitepages,
Yelp
Categorised in: Travel
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