Reference / Android

Wikidroid 

Free 

 Want access to the world's most popular encyclopedia, wherever you are? Then you need Wikidroid. YouH get full Wikipedia content on your Android smartphone, including live links and graphics.

The app is in essence a front end to the popular online encyclopedia. Do a search, and the Android app grabs the relevant information from Wikipedia, formats it so it displays nicely on your Android phone, and then delivers it to you. You get all of Wikipedia's content, including graphics and live links.

When you do searches, Wikidroid suggests potential matches, shortening your searching time. You can even do
voice searches. When you tap the search option, a small button of a microphone appears next to the search box, in the same way it does when you search Google on your Android phone. Tap the button, speak your search, and it goes to work. The voice search uses the same engine as the rest of Android's voice-searching, so it works in the same way.



SHARE BOOKMARKS

There's more. You can create bookmarks and share them with others, and also ask to see a random page. In addition, the app includes many of the Android tools available when you browse to web pages, so you can select text and copy it to the Android clipboard, or share the page with others via email, SMS text messaging, Bluetooth, and social-networking apps such as Facebook. You can also change what language to use with Wikipedia. And you can zoom in and out with the same tools as you can on other Android apps.

If you want to be able to save pages to your Android phone so you can view them offline, you'll need to buy the Wikidroid Flus version for £1.24.


 

   Britannica Encyclopedia
£12.43 

When it comes to fact-finding and pursuing points of knowledge, it's all very-well having the internet at your fingertips on your smartphone - but that counts for nothing when you're not online. That's one of the main reasons for keeping an offline resource such as the Britannica Encyclopedia on your device. The other mooted benefit is that - unlike Wikipedia there ought to be a good chance that entries are factually correct and not the result of a misinformed contribution or even malicious misinformation.

LIMITED DESCRIPTIONS

We've looked at the PC version of Encyclopedia Britannica before, and this app carries similar limitations. There may be more than 35,000 articles here, but you'll still find that most subjects only receive a cursory description. 'Camera', the picture-taking device with a long history, is described in 184 words. 'Earth', our world, gets more than just 'mostly harmless', but at 264 words it still feels a little short for a resume of the planet. But there is a small illustration, in this case a pie-slice through the
crust and core. The app lists 2,700 included images, so only about one in ten entries are given these basic illustrations. For any entry that you alight upon, you can send it in its (brief) entirety to a friend by email with the simple tap of a button located at the top of the screen. You can save any page entry as a Favorite here, too. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the app's home screen is an 'On This Day' button which calls up a list of historical events for that day. Getting even more esoteric, you can give your phone a little shake to receive a random entry.

At £12.43, it's relatively expensive for an app, but may prove useful for pulling up some outline knowledge on a wide range of subjects when you're missing an internet ccnnection. li only its database was more comprehensive then we might find this app indispensable to have around on our travels.