Of course, this is only a first attempt and we laud the Wikipedia Mobile team for releasing this app as an open-source application. However, the fact that the search field is populated with "::Home" when you first open up the app shows that the app still needs a lot of polish before it can compete with the 'unofficial' apps. For now, if you just want a lightweight way of accessing Wikipedia articles from your phone and you don't want to install an app, just use the official mobile site.

The site itself is indeed very basic and has been stripped of all images, which means it works well on a slow connection, but also makes for a somewhat disappointing experience compared to other mobile versions like the Wikipanion iPhone app (iTunes link).

The mobile site also breaks the content of the articles down into separate chunks and puts them onto different pages. This, too, makes browsing faster, but also makes it harder to find information on the service.

Spoken Wikipedia?

Steve Rubel also found a link to a feature called the "Spoken Wikipedia" in the settings, though this functionality is not available yet. We assume that this will allow you to play recorded versions of articles in the future, though we don't know if this will be achieved through speech synthesis or (crowdsourced?) audio recordings. There are already about 800 spoken articles available on the site.

The new school year also means that research via Wikipedia is going to be on the rise. Fortunately for those with iPhones and iPod Touches, they can now access Wikipedia anywhere while on the go with Wikipanion from the iTunes App Store.

Wikipanion (iTunes link) is the best application out for Wikipedia on the iPhone and iPod Touch. This app is simply genius and gives you a simplified version of Wikipedia without leaving out any of the site's extra features. To simply the site to fit the screen size of the iPhone, the normal links that you'd see to each section of an article are foregone on the main screen. Instead, there's a small icon located at the bottom of the app that's similar to the bookmark button in Safari on the iPhone. Using this button, users can access all the sections of an article.

Looking for the list of sources, related topics, and external links for your article? There's a button to access these features also. You not only get to see the links, but you can open them in Safari. According to the developers site, loading Wikipedia pages with Wikipanion is a lot faster than accessing the Wikipedia site from the iPhone's browser. To be honest, we agree.

Wikipanion: The New College Student's Bible

With just about everything accessible from this app including pictures, links, and more, the only thing that's missing is an automatic bibliography creator. Students and Wikipedia fans alike will definitely find this app to be enjoyable. However, if you're into creating articles on Wikipedia, I'm afraid this isn't the app for you. There's no way to edit an article. However, all of Wikipedia's articles are now accessible with just one click with Wikipanion.