Yelp is a pretty incredible service, as anybody who's ever used it knows.  Instead of counting on the opinion of one stuffy critic to decide where to eat, Yelp users can read reviews from regular ol' people like you and me, and with some businesses offering well over 100 reviews you can actually take the pulse of your fellow customers as a group as opposed to just hearing one person's feelings and rolling with it.

The other advantage is that phone apps allow you to pull up Yelp and not only get the reviews you're looking for, but the reviews of restaurants that are actually near your current location.  No more having to call a buddy from the area to see what's good in this neck of the woods.  All you'd have to do was pull up Yelp and browse around a little.

The problem for any BMW of Tampa dealership is that, until recently, Yelp wasn't accessible through BMW's infotainment system, ConnectedDrive.  For all the great GPS navigation and stereo options allowable through the service, Yelp wasn't one of them.  But thanks to a recent update from BMW Online, owners of BMW vehicles from 2009 or later can now use Yelp on their touchscreens, and that, ladies and gentlemen, will forever change the way you eat and shop on the go.

The new Yelp app does many of the same things as the regular smartphone version of the app, but it does have a few car-specific features.  The first is ConnectedDrive's ability to read off the three most recent reviews for a business in order to avoid overt distraction while driving, and the second allows you to email business listings to yourself or a friend to use at a later time.  These characteristics of the BMW version of the Yelp app make it one of the easier and more enjoyable ones to use.

St. Petersburg used BMW dealerships won't be able to do much with this update (unless what they're selling was put out after 2008), but all new vehicles moving forward will put this sort of social reviewing information right at the fingertips of BMW drivers.  You'll never eat at a cruddy restaurant ever again.