Android users have enjoyed the Hotpot feature, which recommends local businesses, on their mobile Google Maps since November. Today Google announced that Hotpot would now be available on the iPhone, as part of a Google Places app.

The app uses the iPhone's location information, and if you sign in with a Google account, you can rate restaurants and other businesses. After this, the app will recommend other similar venues based on your ratings.

Even without the recommendation feature, Places lets users find local establishments, presenting on its home screen buttons for cafes, bars, gas stations, ATMs, hotels, attractions, as well as a search box. When I first ran the app, the bottom of the screen mentioned a local Chinese joint with a button asking me to rate it. But of course, to do so, I had to sign into my Gmail account.

Rating a place is quite simple: For my Chinese eatery, I could simply press a happy face or frown for Food, Service, and Atmosphere, after choosing a star rating out of five. A dropdown offered more rating options, such as portion size and value, but I would have liked more granularity than the simple happy face/sad face choice. I could also write a review—though the mobile keyboard meant I wasn't about to get too prolix.

Once you finish reviewing, you choose a nickname for your online reviews. You can also see the location on a map, get directions, or call from the app. At a computer, you can rate more places by heading to google.com/places. From here you can also share your recommendations with friends. A leaderboard shows all your connections' ratings in the order of who's written the most reviews.

The service squarely takes on Yelp, which has had a location-aware iPhone app for many months. However, although the Google service is much newer, it already boasted a healthy number of reviews, at least in the New York area. It would have been nice to be able to sort listings by rating as well as distance, as you can in the Yelp app.

To install Google Places with Hotpot, search for Google Places in the iPhone App Store (there are other apps named Places, so use the full name). Alternatively, you could use this link and then sync your phone to iTunes on your computer. At present, there's only an English version, but Google claims their working on more languages.