Review: PlaceBox for the iPhone – Find Your Way in the World

Visiting a new place can be a pain in the butt. A new area, unfamiliar streets, maybe even an unfamiliar language. LinkDotz brings us PlaceBox, an app they say will help you find your way in the world. With a few clicks, you can find nearby restaurants, hotels, banks, and more. Let’s take a look and see if it can help you feel a little more comfortable in unfamiliar surroundings.

Overview

PlaceBox is designed to combine the features of location review, directional, and social sharing apps into one app. You can use it to find places, check-in, take notes, take photos and record videos, all in one app.

Finding nearby attractions, restaurants, hotels, etc. is as easy as a few taps of your finger. I was able to find the nearby locations by tapping a category on the main menu, (all categories are represented by colorful icons), I was then presented with more options to narrow my search, (“Public Transportation” shows icons for “Airport”, “Bus Station”, “Train Station”, etc.), tapping one of these icons then presented me with a list nearby transportation options in that category, sorted by distance.

You can also keep notes about your travels, or experiences with the notes function. You can create folders within the notes area to categorize your notes. In the notes, you can include your location, photos, title the note, and also share it via Twitter, Facebook or email.

Using the built-in camera function you can take photos and make a video record of your adventures. You can also access previous photos from within the app.

Verdict

All in all this is a handy app to have in your travel arsenal. If it had a currency converter and a language translator included it would be the perfect travel app for anywhere you may roam. But for $0.99, it offers a convenient and highly useful set of tools. If you travel, this is an app to have on your iPhone.

Price: $0.99 – Available now in the App Store. (App Link)

Rating:4/5[rating:4.0]

Pros:

  • Ease of use, quickly find nearby locations.
  • Clean interface.
  • The notes feature, with folders is a great feature.

Cons:

  • Wish it had a currency converter for foreign travel.
  • In “Airports” it displayed a nearby hospital. It does have a helipad, so…
Chris Hauk

Chris is a Senior Editor at Mactrast. He lives somewhere in the deep Southern part of America, and yes, he has to pump in both sunshine and the Internet.