Finding Restaurants In Your Location With Your iPhone

We all know the feeling of being in a new or unfamiliar city, just looking for something good to eat and all we can find is a dodgy looking McDonalds. I had a similar experience yesterday wandering around Nottingham looking for a decent Indian or Chinese.

But, if you've got an iPhone, you've got nothing to worry about. There are numerous apps available on the iTunes App Store that allow you to use the phone's built-in GPS to pinpoint your location and find all the restaurants in your local area.

A particularly good one of these apps is 'Around Me', which lets you locate takeaways, restaurants, hotels, banks, pretty much anything you might require, then giving you in-depth information about the listing you've chosen.

If you don't fancy downloading an app, but you have an iPhone 3G, you can get online while out and about and go a Google search for what you're after. For example whilst out and about, I did a quick search for 'Chinese takeaway Nottingham' as well as 'Indian Takeaway Nottingham' using the Safari web-browser preinstalled on the iPhone. The results were returned quickly, and i found some incredibly useful recommendations for (and directions to) decent local eateries.

Your last option, if you can't get your phone online at all whilst out and about (and therefore can't download apps or get onto 3G to do a Google search) is to use local directory enquiries to find a suitable takeaway, which should allow you to find a suitable restaurant wherever you are. So, to give you an idea, i rang and asked for good Nottingham takeaways and was immediately given the number of one that the operator recommended, as they lived in Nottingham themselves.

So you can always use your phone to find a good restaurant or takeaway one way or another, and this is just one of a thousand reasons why it's a good idea to get yourself a smartphone.