Review: nearME

In a crowded field of geolocation apps it’s hard to really stand out. webOS apps that take advantage of the phone’s location services seem to pop up regularly these days. Picking the right one to give you the best experience possible when you need it most is becoming quite the challenge. Developer Real Simple Apps throws another one into the mix with the release of nearMe, now in the Palm App Catalog (currently $0.50).

I’m getting picky with these sort of apps these days. It’s not often I find myself in an unfamiliar location, but when I do, it helps to have my Palm Pre at the ready with a geolocation app to get me where I need to go. NearME allows you to search for a particular place or event near your GPS location. It will also search by ZIP code, but you’ll need to know where you are, since a search by City name is non-existent. The events search page can search by category including concerts, sport events, theaters, and more.

NearME relies heavily on Yahoo services to pull its search queries from including Yahoo! Local for business searches and Yahoo! Upcoming for events. This, unfortunately, ends up being its downfall. I don’t doubt the fact that these services have been around a long time, but unless you’re in a major city, the only thing you may find in your event search queries are crickets. When nearME did find events for me, they were miles away from my location with no option to select a search radius.

Search results included a snippet from a review for each business search, but I found many reviews were two, and even four years old and hadn’t been updated in a long time. My guess is this is the fault of a lonely Yahoo! Local page and not the fault of the app itself. A search of a popular chinese food joint near me pulled up zero results, and again, probably the fault of no one submitting business details to Yahoo! Local.

When nearME does work as expected, the results are laid out nicely with the closest result near your location at the top. Selecting a result gives you the name and address of the location along with a phone number. A map link will open Google Maps, and a link is provided to the actual page on Yahoo! Local. You also have the option of adding the business to your Contacts application or emailing the result to a friend. A search for an event brings up the same results, but you can add it to your calendar, which makes for a nice touch.

Interested? Go here to download nearME directly to your device!