Review: Quickpedia (Android)

//If quick information is what you want…

A couple of days ago, we reviewed WikiMobile Encyclopedia;  one of the Android apps that links you into the wonderful world of Wikipedia. Now we’ve gone one better with Quickpedia.

There are several reasons we like it more. Firstly, it just looks much cooler. Open the app and you get a sensible tabbed menu with an open search box. Enter any term and the predictive text list that shows up below is likely to guess what you’re after, which means you can touch on it rather than the slightly more fiddly search button. We prefer it when things aren’t fiddly.

Quickpedia is also very quick at getting information onscreen. Significantly it also gives you the full Wikipedia experience. There is some reformating to fit the screen but you get any image and the infobox right at the top of screen, with the main text flowing below. Neatly this works in both portrait and landscape modes.

You can simply scroll up and down the article with your finger. Subsections are usually condensed with just their subtitles showing, but they can easily be expanded by tapping on them. URLs also open within the app, keeping everything seamless.

Other tabs contain options such as viewing Wikipedia’s random articles, seeing popular articles and articles based on the news. There’s even a Nearby tab, which working off your location data (you can enter this manually or it takes your GPS location) will select articles about places nearby

Filling out the app is the other Option, which is available at the top of each Wikipedia page. This enables you to change the font size, or email the article to a friend or to yourself.

In fact, the only slight problem we have with Quickpedia is that it can use up quite a lot of memory as it saves pages into the phone’s cache for quicker reviewing, so the more Wikipedia pages you open, the larger the amount of stored data becomes. You can always hit the Menu button and manually clear the cache.

Otherwise though, Quickpedia is one of the nicest apps we’ve seen on the Android Market, and certainly the only one you’ll need if you’re interested in checking out Wikipedia when you’re on the move.

//Quickpedia is a well designed and fantastically fast application if you want to look up a Wikipedia page

App: Quickpedia (Android)
Publisher: Next Mobile Web
Price: free
Version reviewed: v1.0.6
Requires: internet, your location (GPS), read phone state
Size: 205KB
Score: 5/5

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