The site is very popular here in the San Francisco Bay area and seems to be taking off elsewhere too. VentureBeat<\/a> reports that OpenTable books reservations for 3 million diners per month and estimates the company’s annual gross revenue at $14 million a year. The service is free to consumers, restaurants pay a fee per diner to OpenTable. It must be cost effective for restaurateurs, 8500 have signed up.<\/p>\n
I started at mobile.opentable.com<\/a> by picking San Francisco Bay Area<\/span> from a drop down list of metropolitan areas and then San Francisco<\/span> proper from a second drop down. On the next page I entered the size of my party and desired date and pressed the Search button. That’s when my problems started. OpenTable brought of a list of all the 341 restaurants that it covers in San Francisco – as a single 144 KB mobile page! I was using Open Mini so the page actually loaded but there is no way that 90% of mobile browsers could handle such a big page. But the worst part is that because I was searching for a table on short notice, three quarters of the restaurants listed “No Times Available”. The full version of OpenTable on the web only lists restaurants that you can actually make a reservation at, why should if be any other way on mobile? Scrolling through the entire list to find all the available restaurants required hitting the “Page Down” key 47 times, not an enjoyable experience.<\/p>\n
Mobile Link<\/em>: mobile.opentable.com<\/a><\/p>\n
Ratings<\/em>: Content: Usability:
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Related<\/em>: WapReview Directory – Search\/Local\/City Guides<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I love OpenTable. If you aren’t familiar with the service, it’s an online search for available reservations at local restaurants. You select your city, preferred dinning time, the size of your party and optionally the neighborhood and cuisine and OpenTable returns a list all the restaurants that have availability. It such a time saver compared with calling up restaurant after restaurant, being put on hold for five minutes and then being told “Sorry we have nothing available at that time”. … Continue reading