Treopedia

Yesterday evening some friends invited me to a talk at the Royal Geographical Society in London.  The topic was: “The Hall of Thousand Columns, Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battuta - a talk about a fourteenth century traveller who saw more of the world than Marco Polo.”

I could in the end not make it to the event but I joined them later at a nearby restaurant where they related much of the talk back to me.  As always my curiosity was spiked to learn a little more about this famous Ibn Battuta who I had never previously heard about and so I pointed the browser on my Treo to mobile.answers.com and within a minute I had a short paragraph providing me a brief description of his exploits.

However, I wasn’t quite satisfied with the one paragraph and so my friend asked me if I had access to Wikipedia to get some additional information.  I was about to answer something like “This is a Treo – of course I have access to any information I want!” but I simply and excitedly launched a new application called iPedia which I had installed barely two days ago (talk about a happy coincidence).

iPedia is a wireless, mobile encyclopedia which has been optimized for use with our Treo.  Any of 560,000+ encyclopedia articles can be extracted in an instant (thanks to an optimized network protocol) from Wikipedia in either English, German or French.  Your query can search the encyclopedia articles based on titles or also list all of the articles in the encyclopedia containing your given query in an ‘extended search’ mode (below right).

Naturally, as this is an encyclopedia you may find yourself immersed in numerous searches in this vast sea of knowledge.  iPedia have come up with a neat page on their website to illustrate some of the typical searches that you might undertake while on the go which include: writers, music bands, countries, cities of the world, composers, movies, music albums, mountains, U.S. presidents, athletes, Nobel Prize winners and television series among others.  Additional features include a fun ‘Random Article’ query, a history of your searches and a ‘Linked articles’ tool which lists all the links in a particular query.

There are a few minor improvements that I would like to see in a future version of iPedia though.  These include the ability to save my searches to the card for later offline reading (currently you have to be connected for every search and no download is kept on the device), email a search and also for the search query box to automatically respond to keyboard input (at present you have to select it with your thumb or stylus in the search results page).

Having said all this, yes, you can get access to Wikipedia by simply using your web browser or even with the additional links provided by Mobile Answers – both of which are free alternative – but there is something to be said about the additional ease of use and speed of iPedia which is hard to match with the free options.  In this respect, I have really been struggling to understand why other free or premium online content has not been similarly repurposed for use on our Treo in a dedicated application – I would certainly love to see more of these around and iPedia is a very good example of a good execution.

Treonauts are always hungry for more knowledge…