Articles for iPad Review

Okay, now that the iPad has been out for nearly two weeks, it’s time to get to our app reviews. We’re kicking things off with a review of Articles for iPad. Articles is a Wikipedia browser designed for the iPad’s large screen. Now you may be wondering, why have Articles when you can browse Wikipedia using Safari for free? Find out why after the break.

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While Articles does wrap Wikipedia articles in a nice, iPad-friendly format, it does offer many other features that let you discover new content. One of my favorite features is the ability to use location services to learn more about places nearby you that have entries on Wikipedia. Say you’re in San Francisco, open up Articles for iPad, and up come up a bunch of articles on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Financial District. You can also scroll the map around to learn about places in a particular area of your choice.

This app is a great way for anyone to learn about random people, places, or things using the “Surprise Me!” feature. Shake your iPad and a random entry pops up. The only thing I found in the app that didn’t work well was pinching to enlarge the text. The text either enlarged too much, or became too small to read. Having finer control over this would be an excellent addition.

Since the iPad you can purchase now (as of April 16th) only has Wi-Fi, Articles for iPad saves recently viewed articles to access when offline. Perfect for a research project while on the road. The app also has a wonderful paper-like design, but it does need some tweaking. There is no table of contents navigation, so you either have to double-tab and drag for the special index control, or flick continuously until you find what you want.

It’s on sale for $0.99 cents now until the developer is “totally happy” with the iPad version, so it won’t break the bank, but grab it before the price goes up!