Think of UpNext as a Google Maps/Yelp mash-up. Sounds like fun, yeah? Now throw in bucketloads of additional features, and you’ve got UpNext.

When you start the app, you’re presented with a view of Manhattan. The different districts are color-coded: Midtown West, Midtown East, Upper East Side, Chinatown, etc. At first, it looks like any other map. And then you start playing around with it. There’s a subway button you can tap to show an overlay of subway routes, and it’ll even tell you the trains passing through. Searching by address or business name? Not a problem. You can pinch and zoom with total fluidity, but when you zoom in far enough, the colored blocks separate into individual 3D buildings. That’s where things begin to get interesting.

Each individual building has information stored on it. For example, tap on a building—any building!—and you’ll see an average star rating, reviews, a photo, the address, phone number, and website. Some buildings don’t have such information available, of course (think apartment buildings and relatively unknown shops) but there are tons of restaurants in the database. Initially, I was skeptical of the reviews—did UpNext have a large enough community?—but the app pulls reviews from editorial sources (think the New York Times) as well as from sites like Yelp.

One of the more powerful features is the category view. Use the categories (Dining, Recreation, Shopping, and Nightlife; each has appropriate sub-categories) to find nearby restaurants or shopping centers, or just to browse. Within the categories view, click “see all” and the map zooms out to show you the entirety of Manhattan, with each result highlighted with a glowing dot. You can then pan around the map until you find something closest to you, or you can just look for an area with a concentration of, say, Indian cuisine.

If you find a building you’d like to visit later, you can bookmark it—or add it to your favorites. Either way, you’ll be able to find it again. I used Facebook Connect to store my data, though you can also create an UpNext account. (Um…why?) You can also add “notes” and reviews, or use the star-based rating system to let others know what you think.

If you already know where you want to go, you can use the search feature to find a specific address or a business, which is handy if you don’t quite know your way around. One problem: there’s no “Did you mean…?” feature, so you have to be precise. For example, there’s this excellent hole-in-the-wall Jewish restaurant called “Sammy’s Roumanian.” I typed in “Romanian,” forgetting the “u.” No results! It would be rather nice if UpNext would make allowances for human error.

And there’s yet another feature packed in here. The feed button, located in the bottom-right, brings up three options: Just Opened, Latest Reviews, or Recent Favorites. These feeds are live-updating lists based on what other UpNext users are doings (well, except for Just Opened, which is a self-explanatory list). It’s a good way to discover a random business, I guess.

Now, in terms of integration with other social network services, UpNext is on the ball. I already mentioned its implementation of Facebook Connect. You can also post your location to your Facebook status, tweet out your location, publish reviews and other activities to your Facebook feed, and add photos to venues in their database.

All right. So those are all of UpNext’s features. Most of them require some form of internet connection, though the map remains even when you’re not connected (there’s no data on individual buildings, but you can look at them). Now, as for the downsides…well, to be honest, there aren’t many. Battery drain is an issue, I’d imagine. There’s no option to send a private email out to your friends informing them of your location either, which could be more useful than a public tweet. And I’d like a more practical “see all” option, where UpNext would display a text-based list with venue names, ratings, and maybe a short description, instead of just showing you the pretty lights on the map.

But all in all, UpNext is a slickly packaged super-powered map of Manhattan, and if you’ve got a trip coming up, you’d do well to invest the $3 into this app. Heck, I imagine that even locals could benefit. I’d like to see future additions to the UpNext library: UpNext 3D San Francisico, UpNext 3D Washington DC…why not? At three dollars, this is worth far more than an easy-to-lose, vague tourist’s map.

The developer’s video below gives you a walkthrough with all of the features.

A flight tracking application is nothing new to the App Store. People track flights for a variety of reasons – be it that their friends or family are flying somewhere, or whether it’s just to find out what is in the sky and where. As technology advances, it is expected that we are able to do all of these things, such as tracking flights, with minimal effort. Therefore, Mobiata needed a unique selling point for their application to make it above the rest, as competition is fierce. They’ve found it.

When loading FlightTrack you are greeted with this unique feature: TripIt Sync. By forwarding your airline confirmation e-mail to the TripIt sync e-mail address, FlightTrack will automatically sync your flight details – departure and arrival times; airports; and flight number to name just a few. This way there’s no excuse for the app not have your flight on record.

Tracking a flight manually is also relatively simple. Just click the ‘+’ button on the top right and you are given two options: track flights by their number or by their route. For tracking flights by their number, the only details you need are the airline (of which FlightTrack tells you there are 751 to date) and the number itself. Once you have punched in the necessary details, a vast array of information is at your fingertips, including how early / late the flight was to depart or estimated time of arrival (ETA). A map (provided by FlightView) is also available to view, showing you a flight’s path and where it currently is in the world. Route tracking is just as easy, with the only required fields being the departure airport and arrival airport. You can track flights up to three days advance.

But the information is not just limited to the flight itself. Detailed info of the airports in question are also available for you to see. Local airport times, temperatures (in both Fahrenheit and Celsius to satisfy all imperialists and metricists) and FAA Delays & Closures are all visible upon closer inspection of an airport. The FAA Delay & Closures section is very handy as it can alert you to possible future delays of flights. For instance, at the current flight that I am looking at, it is telling me that there is a Traffic Management Program in effect which may cause flights to be delayed in an average of 116 minutes.

This application really aims to give you all information you’ll ever need, but to keep it simple looking and easy to understand. It excels in this. You can save the flights you are tracking so that you won’t have to enter the information again, and this subsequently means that you can track as many flights as you like. And if you’re a little bored – you can shake the iPhone and it’ll track a random flight for you! You can send flight information onto others in the form of e-mail, too.

It’s all very well being able to do all of this – but if it is hideously complicated then it’ll repel customers. Thankfully, FlightTrack’s graphical user interface (GUI) takes advantage of many of the iPhone’s unique features which allow it to integrate with the phone smoothly. For editing flights, you edit them just like you would when you go to edit a clock or alarm. For choosing what date, you do it like you do in the calendar application – scroll through the days, the months and the years. FlightTrack takes full use of what is available, as it should. A real, professional-feeling application should be smooth and easy to use: and this is.

The application is exceptional, albeit with a few minor flaws. It would be handy that for when entering the flight number, instead of the iPhone keyboard popping up it is the iPhone numpad instead. In addition, it would be nice to see all flights due to land at a certain airport and at what time. But these are features that can easily be implemented in the future.

One point I’d like to expand upon however is those who are frequent flyers. As a lot of people fly from the same airports and with the same airlines, it could end being a hassle having to enter in flight information time and time again. The ability to search for specific airlines at specific airports (with a simple check box to add to your saved flights) could end up reducing time and increasing the application’s efficiency. If this were to be implemented, I have no doubt that the application would be a winner among frequent flyers.

In concluding, Mobiata, the FlightTrack creator, has created an application that is in all ways beautiful. It flows wonderfully and the interface is spot-on. It is a credit to the developers for this impressively built application, and while you may not use it every day – when you do, you will appreciate it for what it really is: genius.

There are four sections of the Yelp app:

Nearby, Recents, Search, and Bookmarks

Nearby: Presents a list of familiar Yelp categories. With the help of location services, the app will display a list of stuff under that particular category that is nearby. There’s also the Hot on Yelp section underneath the categories, this reveals the most bookmarked places around you in the last month.

Recents: Keeps track of the last ten places you’ve viewed on Yelp. Pretty handy if you view something interesting but forget to bookmark it. That’s about all there is to say about that!

Search: Choosing a category in Nearby will jump you over to this section of the app, it reveals your query results. You can select any result and the app shows all the detailed information including average rating, price level, review preview, phone number, address, directions, the ability to add a photo or add to your bookmarks. You can expand any of these. For example, in the screenshots you’ll see the finer details of Rogue Ale, the full reviews, and the map of it’s location. If you want to narrow your search, you can use all of the handy filters that are available on Yelp’s website…so if I don’t want to spend this month’s rent on dinner, I can choose just $$ (dollar signs). Yelp has a built in map, but there’s a button that lets you jump into google maps straight from Yelp. You can touch through the reviews to disclose the full review instead of a preview, but the fun pretty much stops there – you can’t see the other reviews made by that particular Yelper or make any comments. You also can’t write your own reviews from the mobile app (sad face). You can, however, add photos directly from your camera or camera roll to the Yelp gallery, which is pretty cool and makes me feel like I’m able to contribute something on the go.

Bookmarks: This is the newest feature of the Yelp app. If you have an account on Yelp, you can now sign into it and access all of your bookmarks! This is super handy because sometimes I’ll walk by a restaurant or bar that is closed – and instead of relying on my not-exactly-sharp memory I can find it on Yelp and bookmark it to check out later. This is good for keeping track of places you’d like to review as well.

Conclusion: If you live in a city that has seemingly endless places to go, Yelp is very useful in finding what everyone else thinks are the diamonds in the rough. Plenty of times I’ve found myself wondering into a place without even standing room, and I’ve used Yelp to discover something cooler nearby that I could actually walk into! Hopefully the developers of the Yelp app will incorporate the most requested feature I’ve heard from multiple users of Yelp – the ability to write reviews directly from iPhone. Similar to my opinion of the Facebook app for iPhone, I think the Yelp app is much more desirable to use than the actual website – adding the review feature would assuredly cement this.

Linguo is a general language translation application that includes support for both dictionary type translations and with the help of Google, translation of any text you type in. Add on to that support for 15 languages and over 400 audio clips and you have a pretty useful application.

The real strength of Linguo is the translation service backed by Google’s translation web service. It allows you to translate to / from 15 different languages. This, of course has it’s issues as machine translation is only so good. But it can be very useful, provided you have a data connection to your device when you need the translation. In addition you can save any of the translations you do to a specialized list.

There are phrase dictionaries for the 5 main languages included, English, Spanish, German, French, and Italian. These phrases come with audio clips so you can hear how the sound — or just play them for whomever you are trying to communicate with.

The price is right if you find yourself needing language translation, give it a try.

Developer: Travelocity
Price: FREE
Date Listed in App Store: 7/5/2008
Version Reviewed: 1.0

If you travel a lot, up to date flight times and TSA wait time can be some of the most useful information to have on the go. Checking for flight delays is something I do rather psychotically when on the go. But does this application really add much value over the iPhone optimized Travelocity site?

The app provides 4 main sections: Flights, Hotels Near Me, My Trips and Preferences.

Flights is where most people will spend their time.  You can do the same things here that you can on the Travelocity iPhone site, search  flight schedules for all airlines between 2 airports and then select one to get details.  Navigation gets a little wonky here — they might want to re-read the human interface guidelines from Apple.  It gets confusing trying to navigate back to the list of flights.  Also, it seems to only show you the first 8 with no way to get to others later in the day or even other days.

If you know your flight number you can skip right to the gate and wait time information.  Useful especially if you are getting ready to head to the airport.

The Hotels Near Me feature is interesting if not all that useful.  I can’t remember more than once that I’ve been stuck in some far away place without a hotel reservation, or a floor somewhere, or at least an all night bar.  But if that’s not good enough for you, this is the app for you.  Or, really, you can just use the built in Maps application and do a search for hotel.

I’m not a Travelocity customer so I couldn’t test out the My Trips feature.  Guessing this might be the most useful of all features, if you are a Travelocity customer that is.  Is anyone a Travelocity customer?  Anyone other than that damn gnome?

Preferences are just lets you enter your Travelocity.com login info to sync your trip info. Nothing useful like favorite airports or storing frequent flyer info or anything like that.

For anyone who is not a Travelocity customer, this app adds very little over the Travelocity iPhone optimized site.  If you are a regular Travelocity customer, being able to have your itineraries with you might make this worth downloading. But navigation issues and bugs make this application rather annoying to use at times.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars