iPhone Wikipedia apps

29.12.2008
is the great argument settler. I can’t tell you how many times my friends and I have had heated debates over some piece of meaningless trivia, only to end it with, “We’ll see who Wikipedia thinks is right.”

There is a whole class of applications in the App Store that put Wikipedia in your pocket and on your iPhone or iPod touch. In this Wiki apps roundup—the first of two I’ll be writing for iPhone Central—I’ll take a look at three paid Wikipedia clients for the iPhone: WikiPDA, Wikipanion Plus, and Look Up: Encyclopedia for Your Pocket.

You get what you pay for

Feature Rich: Wikipanion Plus costs more than the other two apps reviewed here, but its queue mode and search within a page features set it apart. Right off the bat you’ll notice that, at $5, Wikipanion Plus costs more than the other two apps. (Note that there’s also a available in the App Store.) Why such a big difference in price? Wikipanion Plus has a couple of great features that set it apart from the less expensive apps: queue mode and search within a page.

No doubt you’ve found yourself in a situation similar to this: you think to yourself, “I wonder what the average rain fall in Lima, Peru is.” A quick Wikipedia search tells you that Lima gets about 1 to 6 cm of rainfall a year. Several hours later your innocent meteorological query has cost you a few hours and you’ve somehow ended up on Kevin Kline’s Wikipedia page (did you know his middle name is Delaney?). All of this idle wandering on Wikipedia isn’t exactly friendly when you have limited bandwidth (say you’re on your iPhone but not within the range of a Wi-Fi network), and that’s where Wikipanion Plus’ Queue mode shines.

I Finally Found What I’m Looking For: Enter a search term, and WikiPanion Plus will highlight it in yellow.Tapping on a link with Queue mode enabled doesn’t take you to the page, instead it pops up an alert informing you the linked page has been added to your queue. You can add more pages to your queue with a tap, or visit the link directly by tapping and holding down on the link. (If you are not in Queue mode, tapping and holding adds a link to the queue instead of visiting it directly.) Once links have been added to your queue you have two options: you can visit the links in any order, or download all the linked pages for offline viewing (great for plane rides). You can also set Wikipanion Plus to automatically download and save the queued pages in the background as you finish reading up on particle accelerators.