Local search app Poynt comes to Android

Poynt, a local search app in the vein of Yelp, which until today was available for iPhone and Blackberry users, has launched its Android app.

We don’t have any experience with the Blackberry app, so we’re just going to talk about the Android app released today and the recently updated iPhone app. First of all, both the iPhone and Android apps are nice looking (the screenshot above is from the iPhone app), that shows a fun 3D feature dialer when the app launches. When you launch the app, it automatically turns on your GPS (if it wasn’t already on) and asks you “Where can we Poynt you today?” (get it?) with the 3D dialer below showing businesses, restaurants, gas stations (Android only), movies, and somewhat surprisingly – people search

Restaurant search brings in listings from SuperPages, OpenTable and CitySearch (no Yelp), but otherwise is pretty standard. Really, most of the app offers standard local search features, with perhaps the exception being the people search, which is basically an integrated white pages feature that includes reverse lookup by phone and address as well as by name. Of course, there are dedicated white pages apps for this, but it’s a little unusual to see this integrated into a local search app.

Right now at least, Poynt doesn’t seem to interested in letting users add new data such as reviews, comments, or check-ins, instead opting to just be an aggregator. Without those increasingly standard features, Poynt right now is basically just a well laid out local search app, without much add on or niche value – i.e. the app needs more direction. That said, it’s a solid start design wise and we’ll keep an eye on it to see how it progresses across mobile platforms.

You can download the free Android app through the Android Market.