App of the Day: Localscope - Find anything, anywhere

Available on: iOS
Reviewed on: iPad
Price: $ 1.99

Introduction:

For those who are looking for an app that will find a pub or eatery in the neighbourhood, here's LocalScope. It will search for a barber, a gas station, a hotel, a pub, a cinema hall, a pharmacy and just about everything else but a kitchen sink in your vicinity. It will search Google Maps, Bing, FourSquare, WikiMaps and even Twitter to find the location of your choice.

Usability:

As far as interface goes, LocalScope is very simple. There is a vertical scrolling menu, which shows a list of services we can search for, and then there are five tabs, which divide searches from Google Maps, Bing, Twitter, Four Square, and Wikimapia. There is also a search box that can be used for customized searches.

The searches from Google Maps are very accurate and always end up with a decent number of options in a 2Km radius. The Bing and Four Square search results are quite patchy  - when we were searching for a pub we ended up with search results 30km away from our given position.

The Twitter search is an interesting addition as it finds Twitter users who have tweeted about a place in the vicinity.

It even has an inbuilt GPS functionality powered by Google Maps that provides directions to the place that you choose.

Apps like AroundMe provide similar functionality but LocalScope, in comparison, provides a more detailed and accurate search experience powered by multiple platforms like Bing and Google.


Verdict:

Its best used as an emergency app when you need to find a place in a hurry. We don't recommend you totally depend on the app, as it does not deliver accurate results all the time - especially when searches are customized.  The app is heavily reliant the various mapping engines it sources and does not have a mapping engine of its own which means customized searches would throw up limited results. In-spite of this, LocalScope manages to provide decent options and does not confuse the user.

At the price of $1.99 it is definitely a handy tool to have on your iPhone. The only gripe is that it is not available on any other platform other than the iOS. Though, the developers of the app tell us that other platforms are planned and will be supported soon.



Rating: 3.5

Usability - 4
Price - 3.5
Wow factor - 3.5