This past week, we received a copy of a new iPhone app from Kids Eat For. It’s a great application that helps you find “kids eat free” deals near you. I really love this app because the information in the application is community built by users. That means you’re always getting up to date information from real people who have actually found these deals for you. And, if you’re a user of the app, you’re part of that community too and can contribute deals that you find or know about. Kids Eat For is currently available in the iTunes store for $2.99.  And, even if you don’t have an iPhone, read on, Kids Eat For has something for everyone (hint: it’s a FREE website).

The App

The application itself is very easy to use and has a really simple interface. To start finding deals in your area, you just start the application and your iPhone determines your location and Kids Eat For immediately provides you with a list of restaurants near you offering kids eat free deals. The basics are that simple. The list provides you with the name of the restaurant offering the deal, their address, and their approximate distance from you. It also has an icon next to the restaurant name indicating whether kids eat free there today or on some other day.

When you touch a restaurant in the list, you get complete details about the restaurant and the deal including the restaurant’s address, phone number and the meal deal info, for example, “Kids 12 and under eat free all day. Purchase an adult meal and get one kids meal free. Dine in only“. Kids Eat For provides a nice graphic representation of what days of the week the deal is offered on. From this detail screen, you can also give a thumbs up or thumbs down on the deal to confirm that the deal is still be offered or no longer being offered. I love that feature because I can’t tell you how many times we’ve gone to restaurants who supposedly have kids eat for free deals only to find out that the deal was no longer offered!

The restaurant detail page makes it easy to contact the restaurant displayed: simply press a telephone icon to directly call the restaurant.  Want to know where the restaurant is or how to get there?  Pressing the mapping icon displays the location of the restaurant on a map for you. To get directions to the restaurant, all you have to do is click on it and press route and presto…directions to the restaurant!

This app doesn’t limit you to just restaurants in your area. There is a great search function that allows you to search by either restaurant name or by location. We travel to other cities frequently and knowing that we can search for restaurants with free offers before we head out makes our dining planning much easier. Another feature of the app that I really like is the mapping feature. After you get a list of results from either the search feature or the basic “find deals near you” feature, you can touch the map icon and get a map showing the locations of all the restaurants in your list along with you current location (highlighted in blue). Smartly, the pushpins representing the restaurant locations are color coded to indicate whether or not the free meal deal is offered today or on some other day. From the map, all you have to do is click on a pushpin and it pops up the name and address of the restaurant. Touching the restaurant pop-up box provides all of the restaurant/deal details I discussed earlier.

So, what do you do if you find a new free meal deal? Simple…touch the Add icon. This brings up a really simple entry screen to provide the deal info. You just enter the following information: restaurant name, address (or have your iPhone find the address for you), the phone number (if you know it), the basics of the actual deal, and what days the deal is offered on. Save the deal and you’re done. You just became part of a cool community built project! Doesn’t that feel good?

Review

I am a complete techie and an admitted iPhone fanboy, so to make sure this app was everything I thought it was, I had several moms and all of the Five Hens give it a spin just to get an unbiased opinion. Everyone agreed that Kids Eat For was extremely easy to use and provided really useful information. The application is completely intuitive even for mom’s who have never touched an iPhone before.

We took a look at the accuracy of all of the deals in our local area and we found the results to be 100% accurate. To test the completeness of the data, we compared the list of free deals found with Kids Eat For to a local parenting magazine that is known as the “authoritative source” of free meal deals in Northern Colorado. Surprisingly (or maybe not), Kids Eat For contained many deals not in the local parenting magazine. If you ask me, that says a great deal about the power of community based data collection (known as crowd-sourcing). I am a tremendous fan of any crowd-sourced projects and love that Kids Eat For is a grass-roots, community built application and data source.

But I Don’t Have an iPhone!

Well, that’s OK too because Kids Eat For has a great website offering the same information provided in the iPhone app at http://www.kidseatfor.com/. It’s worth checking out.  The website is just as good, if not better than the iPhone app.  It even offers additional features like weekly calendars of deals in your area and information about what’s on the kids menu at specific restaurants! Based on an evaluation of local restaurants near us, we’d say this website delivers for sure! If you don’t have an iPhone, just head over to http://www.kidseatfor.com/ and find some great deals.

And if you happen to have a phone with the Android OS on it, you’re in luck because Kids Eat For also has an Android of the app available in the Android Market.

Golden Egg Rating

Overall we give both the Kids Eat For iPhone app and website 5 out of 5 Golden Eggs for ease of use, great feature set, and accuracy and completeness of the information provided. The iPhone app is definitely worth $2.99 for the convenience of having all of this great information with you when you’re on the go.

Kids Eat For iPhone App Giveaway

This week, Five Hens is giving away 5 FREE copies of the Kids Eat For iPhone App.  Giveaway ends Sunday, September 20 at midnight PST. Click here for details on how to enter to win.

Application Screenshots & Slideshow

Check out the lightbox slideshow below of screenshots from the app and website. Simply click on a thumbnail to start the slideshow. Details and information for each screenshot are located at the bottom of the image in the slideshow.