I could conduct searches by city and state, address or (most useful on a cell phone) Zip code. When this program found a business, I could press a button to call it, view a map, get driving directions or read (barely useful) reviews of restaurants. I could also add that business or person's number to the phone's address book by pressing a button.
The weather feature, however, looked like an afterthought, offering no more detail than what runs on The Post's front page: the date, high and low temperatures and a short description like "mostly cloudy."
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SuperPages can also look for movies playing at nearby theaters, a nice extra. But when I selected a movie and asked to see theaters where it was playing, I got a strictly alphabetical listing instead of a list showing what was closest to my Zip code.
The second-biggest issue here was the time it took to conduct these searches. Just loading the application took about 25 seconds, starting from an offline mode. Conducting a business-name search took another minute and change.
The biggest issue was the way that SuperPages never knew where I was -- I had to enter my Zip code or street address to start a search, even though Verizon's network has a pretty good idea of where the phone might be. Verizon says it is working on adding this capability, but it needs to make sure it works reliably without compromising the reliability of the phone.
You might ask why anybody would bother using this application when you can just hit a Web page and use that for your searches. But SuperPages works faster than that. Like the Sherlock and Watson programs for Mac OS X or the Mozilla Amazon Browser, it separates Web data from the Web, putting it in a simpler, more accessible container.
Services like SuperPages certainly have a bright future, if a recent personal experience is any sign. My friend Doug called me the other week from a cabin in Wisconsin -- not to say hi, but to see if I could look up some hotel information on the Web for his drive home. How did we ever live without the Internet...?
-- Rob Pegoraro (rob@twp.com)
