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Nextstop, an online activity guide that launched earlier this year, is now offering an iPhone version that lets users find cool activities nearby, even if they’re not sitting at their computer.

San Francisco-based nextstop competes with many other activity guides by trying to provide information in the most accessible and fun way. The iPhone site (yes, it’s a mobile website, not an application downloaded from Apple’s App Store) certainly delivers on that front. When you open it, the site lists a bunch of nearby attraction, then you can click down on one and scroll them in a slideshow view.

The interface is slick and fast — there were almost no loading delays when the Nextstop team demonstrated the app using the office WiFi, and it was only a little slower when I tried it on a 3G cellular network. It’s also easy to browse different activity guides, or even write a short recommendation for wherever you are (nextstop uses GPS to guess where you are, and users can write recommendations that are only a couple sentences long, which is more doable than a lengthy review on an iPhone).

One of the most interesting things about the iPhone is the fact that it is a site, not a downloadable app. Nextstop’s founders told me they didn’t want to be slowed down by the App Store approval process, and found they could deliver as rich an experience building a mobile website as they could with an app. The one exception was the ability to upload photos taken by the iPhone, so they built a specific app for that — when you try to upload a photo from the site, it will offer you the opportunity to download the camera app. But besides the camera functionality, nextstop can update and improve its site without Apple’s oversight.

The problem is, most iPhone users are used to thinking in terms of apps. But nextstop co-founder Adrian Graham argues that the site has the richness and speed of a native app — in fact, it’s arguably better since you don’t have to close the app and jump into the Safari mobile browser when you click on an external link. Graham noted that nextstop already gets a fair amount of iPhone traffic to its non-iPhone optimized site, so this also presents a better experience to those mobile visitors.

There’s an educational component, of sorts, too — I noticed that the nextstop iPhone site has a little reminder at the bottom saying that you can add a bookmark to your home screen, making it as easy to access as an app. Co-founder Carl Sjogreen also noted that Google has also been big pushing for more mobile websites, rather than downloadable apps. Not only have its executives made statements to that effect, but the Google iPhone app is basically a bunch of links to different mobile websites.

“We’re early adopters, but we’re not standing alone,” Sjogreen said.

Nextstop is self-funded, and eventually plans through make money through a combination of advertising and premium services.