Redbox Multimedias Blog

What is POYNT ?
POYNT is a free local area search application that allows you to search for businesses, restaurants and cinemas in your location. The POYNT app works on the GPS signal from your smart phone enabling you to have a concise and accurate listing of facilities and businesses closest to you. There are four different categories that you can search: Business, restaurants, map it and movies.

The Business Search is powered by Thomson Local and Bing and gives you the listing of your enquiry along with further results closest to the business name, not the category of the business, which can be misleading. By highlighting a result it will give you the business name and address along with the distance from you, if you select your highlighted result a separate menu gives you more options:
Call the phone number: no need to try and write it down or copy and paste
Save location: is just like adding it to favourites or creating a bookmark
Map listing: will show whereabouts your search item is on a map from you
Map route: will give you directions from your location to your search item
With all search categories you can also add the details to your address book and email them to a friend

The Restaurant results are powered by Thomson local, Bing, opentable.com and toptable, but instead of looking for just a business name it lets you search for restaurants nearby your location, restaurants by cuisine and also restaurants by name. The add to calendar facility is incorporated within this menu allowing you to make the booking and add this to your smart phones calendar. All without leaving the application.

The movies search is comprehensive as it lets you search by movie title, for the nearest cinema and by not only giving the name of the cinema address and postcode along with the distance from you, it also gives you what movies are playing, the run time, start times, certification and you can preview trailers of the movie in low medium or high quality. There is a buy tickets facility but this option may not be available at some cinemas. When you go into the secondary menu it gives the additional option” See Theater Details”, this gives the address, phone number, number of screens and features. The features is good as this will let you know if it has special facilities; handicap means that it has wheelchair access and disabled toilets etc and hearing allowing for hard of hearing to use minicom. You can also add the cinema details, obtain a map from your position to the cinema and add it to your calendar of your smart phone.

You can change the settings to personalise features in the options and settings menu which allows you to change mapping and navigation from Blackberry maps to Google maps mobile, menu interface (icon display), how many search results display per page, font size and to change from metric to imperial for distance and weather units.
Poynt is a good app to have if you are travelling or visiting an area you are not familiar with but with any app that uses GPS the battery life will soon deplete. The free app is available for blackberry, Iphone and android handsets and are available to download at the respective stores. It is also available to download for free at
http://www.poynt.com/