The Google Places iPhone app saw a major upgrade today and added three features that will make it all the more appealing to use instead of competing mobile location search apps: filter by proximity, rating and price, filter by “open now” and the ability to read full reviews of restaurants and other businesses inside the app.
In other words, show me a coffee shop that’s close to me and open now. The addition of these features to the Google Places helps bring its app to feature parity with Yelp’s iPhone app. You’ll need to download an update to the app to see the new features.
The Places app doesn’t appear yet to have integrated much in the way of Plus-style social features, but presumably that’s forthcoming. Will it be good? Who knows – the service’s launch of an API a year ago doesn’t appear to have resulted in much yet.
That said, I use the Google Places app on my iPhone whenever I want to look up anything but restaurants. I still prefer Yelp for restaurants because I think there are more, longer and better reviews posted. But if I’m looking for a convenience store, bar, park or other type of Place – I really like what Google is doing. The ability to filter for businesses open now sounds pretty sweet.