Applications that search for local businesses, restaurants, people and movies are nothing new to the app store. There have been great apps for this purpose and there have been very poor ones. Poynt is one of the better applications when it comes to user interface and search capabilities. What it lacks in some areas, it makes up in others.

The main navigation page consists of four icons that may be selected by swiping your finger across the screen to spin them around. The animation is smooth here and it actually becomes fun to select which category you’d like to search. You can select movies, restaurants, businesses or people. The app will automatically find your current position so you can search nearby businesses, or you can type in your own location and they will be saved in a list for future use.

The movies section includes the standard options with some unique filters not found in some other apps. You can also search for the top ten movies and a specific genre. So, if you’d like, you can search for all the horror movies playing in your area. You can watch the trailer, mail the information to a friend and buy tickets through Movietickets.com.

The business search allows the user to search for a specific business name or a keyword, such as electronics. However, there is no option to select a category of business. For example, it would be useful to have the option to select “auto repair facility” from a menu. The search results show you how many miles away the place is and in what direction. You can choose to call the business, visit the website, check the location on a map and get directions using Google maps. A really nice feature here is that you can automatically add all the information to your address book. You can also view the business location and all of your search results in augmented reality by tilting your iPhone to landscape view.

The people and restaurant searches work similarly to the business search, except that you can actually search restaurants by food type. So, if you’d like, you can search for only nearby Japanese restaurants. You can also read reviews, but you can’t actually write one yourself.

Poynt does lack some social networking features that should really be standard in all search applications. You should have the ability to share your searches with people on Twitter and Facebook. Poynt allows you to save a search result as a search location, but not as a favorite. It would be nice to have a favorites or bookmarks page. Even though it lacks these features, it excels in combining the major searches into one application. Many apps that search for businesses and restaurants do not include the ability to search for movies, but Poynt does. If Poynt adds the social networking features and the ability to write your own reviews, I believe it has a chance at becoming one of the top search applications out there. It’s a free app and I strongly recommend trying it out. It can only get better.

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