Apple Maps makes it easy to get your grub on. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
Finding an awesome spot to eat has always been easy on the iPhone. But iOS 10 makes it super-simple to book a restaurant reservation in Apple Maps.
With the new third-party app extensions in Maps, users can now reserve a table without ever leaving the Maps app. Just find the spot you want to dine at, and with a few extra taps you’ll be on your way to a fine dining experience.
Chick-fil-A registers are getting an upgrade. Photo: Mike Mozart/Flickr
Getting your chicken fix will no longer require a wallet at Chick-fil-A restaurants.
The company’s long-awaited Apple Pay rollout that was announced last year is finally coming to stores nationwide this week, allowing iPhone and Apple Watch owners to pay with a tap.
Apple’s added a lot of Yelp integration into iOS over the past two years, but despite providing copious amounts of reviews for every restaurant in the U.S., the app hasn’t let you actually write a review from your iPhone.
Yelp 7.0 was just pushed to the App Store and now gives users the ability to write reviews from their iPhone. Now you can trash a restaurant’s king salmon tartare on taro chips while waiting for your waitress to bring a check. Not finished with your praise? You can save a draft and publish it later, too.
Ordering and paying for food using a mobile app or website has hit the mainstream.
Many fast food and restaurant chains now offer iPhone apps that facilitate ordering for delivery or pick up. A number of services, like Splick-it and Grubhub, also help facilitate such orders through an iOS app, offering independent restaurants to compete with the chains. Beyond apps, there are web-based services like Mealeo that offer the same functionality. Despite being a relatively new phenomenon, online and mobile ordering has become a serious business – over two-thirds of Americans use such services on a regular basis.
In fact, of those two-thirds of Americans, most say they tend to order more from a mobile or web service than they would over the phone or in person.
The mobile payment options becoming mainstream are the simplest and low-tech ones.
Read enough articles about NFC and its potential for mobile payments and you’ll find yourself thinking the technology is the inevitable mobile payment platform. Every major mobile platform except iOS already includes or will include support for NFC-enabled devices. There are lots of partnerships being announced between key players like device manufacturers, carriers, and banking or credit card companies. It also just seems to make sense that this is the future.
Until you look up from all the stories about what NFC and look at what’s really happening in the world. You don’t see much evidence of NFC payment systems in everyday life. NFC isn’t yet emerging into mainstream commerce, but there is ample evidence that mobile payments are taking off without it. Those options becoming mainstream are decidedly low tech by comparison, but that’s precisely why they’re succeeding.
Siri is getting a major update with iOS 6, including support for Apple’s newest iPad. There’s plenty of new features to see, so we went hands on with Siri running on the new iPad. Check out the video after the break.
Before Apple released its iOS 5.1 update to the public earlier this month, clicking on a Yelp link after performing a search with Siri did absolutely nothing. Now, however, it’ll take you straight to Yelp’s iOS app — or the App Store if you don’t already have it installed.
Deals — that’s what we want. No doubt about it. Combine our love of cuisine with our zeal for deals and a website like BiteHunter becomes a well-worn destination. And now, they’ve got an iPhone app.