Another feature that sets Wikipanion Plus apart is the ability to search within a page, which has long been a browser standard. Tap the gear icon and a menu slides open with a few buttons on it, the top most being Search in Page. Tap it, enter your search terms, and after a little crunching your search terms are highlighted in yellow.

It’s All Here: Like Wikipanion Plus, Look Up: Encyclopedia For Your Pocket displays the entire Wikipedia entry.The $3 Look Up from follows the same path as Wikipanion Plus when it comes to displaying wiki entries, though at a slightly cheaper price. The entire article is displayed, which is easier to use. But as I pointed out earlier, it also means larger file sizes for download. Look Up also adds a dedicated button for listing a table of contents for the article you are currently reading so you can skip to different sections easily. Look Up also boosts autocompletion for search results which I found to work a little faster than the same feature in Wikipanion Plus.

Cheap doesn’t mean bad

At $1, WikiPDA is the cheapest of the lot, so it makes sense that it doesn’t have as many features as either of its pricier competitors. It doesn’t do much more than allow you to search Wikipedia from your iPhone, but in a slightly different way than the previous two apps.

Fact-Finding Mission: WikiPDA loads pages quickly by using a mobile-friendly format.WikiPDA concentrates on making load times very fast by using mobile-friendly formatted Wiki pages. (I particularly appreciated this when using the app via EDGE.) WikiPDA consistently loaded pages faster than both Wikipanion Plus and Look Up, which present more traditional page results. Speedy load times are accomplished partly by paginating each article, which means it takes more effort to read a long article on WikiPDA. Other than that, its only features are a history of the pages you visited and multilingual support. (All three apps offer the same language support as Wikipedia itself.)