For a recent transplant like myself, New York is a mysterious jungle, promising to deliver just about anything you want, but only if you can find it.
But moving to a new city has been a perfect opportunity to take full advantage of the digital Sherpa hidden inside my iPhone. Thanks to the abundance of location-based mobile services and applications, I am able to navigate labyrinthine neighborhoods and discover restaurants, galleries and cozy pubs in my new town — not to mention navigate unknown cities when I’m traveling for work.
Most apps are made for the iPhone first, but that could change as other companies open their own app stores. Google (maker of the Android mobile phone operating system), Research In Motion (maker of the BlackBerry), Microsoft (maker of the Windows Mobile operating system) and Nokia (the biggest mobile phone maker) have all either opened or said they would open stores to sell third-party mobile applications, so users should be able to find most apps on most smartphones. Here are some that can help urban explorers.
Heading Out
Trying to find a decent place to nosh in an unknown city can be treacherous. Using Urbanspoon, which covers major cities in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States, helped uncover the best salmon nigiri I’ve had since leaving the West Coast of the United States. Urbanspoon’s free iPhone application, which relies on a gimmicky, shakable interface — think Magic 8 Ball — can get tiresome, but being able to quickly search by neighborhood, price and cuisine never does.
OpenTable’s database of restaurants and reviews is a reliable fallback for scouting out a good place to get a bite, mostly in North America but expanding (Dubai lists 15 reviews, all hotel-based restaurants). OpenTable offers a mobile version for the iPhone and BlackBerry that lets you reserve a…