Oct 16 2009
New WikiReader satisfies curiosity cravings even when you’re not connected
WikiReader gives you the 3+ million English language Wikipedia articles anywhere anytime
So you’re hiking on the Donner Pass far away from the crowds and well away from any connectivity. A 40MPH wind kicks up and you know the first snowfall of the season is just around the corner. The safety of the car is not that far away but it wasn’t that way with the Donner Party. Who were they? Did they really resort to cannibalism? I pulled my WikiReader out of my jacket and read about the “westering fever” of the 1840′s. And yes, they resorted to cannibalism, which was neatly hyperlinked in the article.
It’s that kind of “I wonder” moment that the new WikiReader satisfies with more than 3 million English language articles of the Wikipedia on a small touchscreen device. Spur of the moment cravings for info. Idle curiosity. Your kids’ out-of-the-blue questions. Or the real need for info like looking up mattress sizes (couldn’t remember what constituted a double or full mattress). Let me tell you, that one search took me on a voyage about the history of mattresses. Did you know that the original waterbed goes back to 3600 BC where beds made of goatskins filled with water were used in Persia?
Such is the joy of information, and rather than be the proprietary pricey domain of smartphones, the Openmoko people developed the $99 WikiReader, about the size of a man’s wallet, and they squeezed down the 30GB of the English language Wikipedia text to fit on an 8GB microSD card. Updates are free through periodic downloads to the memory card (their newsletter tells you when new uploads are ready). Or you can get a new microSD card fully loaded twice a year for $29 by mail. Search is easy using an on-screen monochrome keyboard and three buttons do the rest: Search, History and Random. Watch out for Random, though. You can easily lose an hour while you pull up one article after another, snacking on the rich information on the device.
Watch for the WikiReader at Lunch at Piero’s, January 2010.
Who is this for? Anyone. I have a smart phone loaded both with IE and Skyfire and I find those interfaces slow and annoying. I also travel abroad quite a bit and wouldn’t want to be charged roaming fees while I look up info, so the simplicity of the WikiReader is ideal — no strings attached. All the data resides on the device. And WikiReader makes a great travel guide. Suddenly you’re the expert on everything. You can even tell your children where Dairy Queen came from on your next country road trip without ever racking up a data charge.
