love seeing that G1 battery meter falling in almost real time.
Can you get to the restaurant before the battery fails.

I love android but boy that G1 batttery suffers under all that always on, background app conditions.

The G1's battery is poor, but the amount it runs down in the video isn't real-time. We *ahem* did a few takes *ahem*...

Nice to know Qype stands up against Spoonfed which is more of an events app. We haven't integrated our events data on to Qype Radar yet so it's much more of a 'places to go' than a 'things to do' finder.

Would have been cool if you'd showed off some of the 'write a review' and 'upload a photo' tools for Radar - but maybe next time eh?

New Android update out very soon by the way.

Oh, and it's worth noting that Lastminute's NRU uses Qype review data :)

We originally planned to show lots of each application's features, unfortunately none of the three apps proved suitable in a "real-world" test.

"Events" and "Venues" shouldn't be serviced by separate applications IMO. If an application like this is going to exist it needs to show you where to go and what to do. When I'm out and about I shouldn't have to try and remember which out of Qype and Spoonfed does events and which does venues, I should just be able to type in "Live music" or "Pub" or whatever and the application should be clever enough to figure out what I want near where I am.

As for the radar screen, that would be the one with "Point the device North" written across the top? Might as well have told the end user to point the device at their arse for all the good that does them. This feature is only relevant on devices with a build-in compass such as the G1 or iPhone 3G-S.

As long as engineers and phone geeks continue building these apps for other engineers and phone geeks there will be a wide gap between mass-market adoption and niche little toys. I wonder if the investors of these companies can wait that long?

Those are interesting features, but not what we wanted to test on this occasion... We felt the 'find me something to do now or later today' was more realistic scenario for mobile users.

I agree, it would be great to have events data on Qype Radar, as we do on the site, but there's also an argument for keeping it simple and giving people what they want.

The Qype dev team isn't sat in a windowless room creating gadgets for their own amusement (and we definitely don't ask people to point their phone north), instead we're constantly asking our users what they want from a mobile app - and what they want is something which can tell them where the good places are near them, no matter where they might be. Whether that's a restaurant, a pub, a shop, or a tube station.

So that's what we've built.

We're always improving and updating (the latest version of the Android app is available on marketplace from today) so we'll get there with events data, and when we do it will intuitive, fast and smart. I promise.

To clarify, I was criticising all the apps in the above post. The radar feature I was referring to is actually on the Spoonfed app asks you to point north (too many radars!).

I completely agree that you don't want to overcomplicate things but having two applications that do similar things but not quite (events versus venues) is ultimately worse for the end user.

Asking your users is a great way to appeal to... your users, who are presumably the sort of people who will download an app and try it out. Try asking people who wouldn't normally download an application what kind of thing they'd like to see.

Don't get me wrong, Qype does what it does very well... I just think this whole area of the market needs a kick up the arse to get to where it needs to be (in front of the mass market).

absolutely - this was quite shocking in how badly the apps performed.

Personally I would have used Lastminute.com (as you did in the end) or TrustedPlaces.com for finding the pub, and from the look of the Spoonfed iPhone app it wasn't suited for finding pubs, but it had a category for comedy, so would that have found the event for Ben?

I'd like to see you try that outside London too... I've put a lot of the restaurants/pubs I've been to in Finland and Germany, but other than mine there weren't any last time I checked, and even in my town/county in Cambridgeshire there's only a handful of places on Qype/TP with any reviews. Lastminute is the only one that seems to have decent coverage.

It shames me to say it, this is probably my favourite ReallyMobile video yet...
AND IM NOT IN IT!

Although I was Chief Camera Person - Wheee! :)