One of the coolest advantages of a portable internet device, is being able to find information anywhere/anytime. Wikipedia is arguably the best place to start the search, regardless of the subject. So how does it work with the iPhone?

You could simply go to Wikipedia.org on your iPhone, but the layout will be a little difficult to read. Safari can certainly let you read it, but you’d have to scroll a lot.

A better way is iPodia (http://keishi.net/ipodia), which reformats the pages specifically for the iPhone. For people living in countries that ban Wikipedia, this is also a way to get around that ban, since you’d not be surfing Wikipedia itself, but a modified version on the iPodia site. Unfortunately iPodia seems to be blocked in China too.

But there is another site, that is very similar to iPodia, but it seems to do an even better job at formatting. It’s simply called Wikipedia (please change this!) and you can find it here: http://wikipedia.comoki.com. Unfortunately this is also blocked in China…

However there is a third alternative, which is to install the whole Wikipedia site onto your iPhone as an application. The file is about 2GB, which can easily fit into your 8GB/16GB iPhone. With this app you won’t have any connection problem at all, and it’s very fast. Unfortunately you won’t get the latest version of Wikipedia (the most recent one is October 2007). Also the formatting is not great, and I didn’t get any pictures either. But it was more than enough for my needs, which is to check information about a certain topic. You can find the Wikipedia.app here: http://code.google.com/p/wikipedia/iphone

The iPhone has probably the best mobile internet browser. It is so popular that there are now many sites that have an iPhone compatible version of their site.

- Some sites have a version of their website specifically for the iPhone.
- Other sites have a general mobile version that also looks good on the iPhone.
- A third type of site is one created only for iPhone browsers.

Here are some of the ones I have visited.

- Chinese-English dictionary: this is a great site for Chinese-English translation. Type in a chinese charater (traditional or simplyfied), a pinyin or an English word and you will get all corrispending translations. Very simple to use and fast.

- Encyclopedia Brittanica has an iPhone version of their site. Very useful if you need to quickly find out about something. Very extensive entries, but slightly slow to load.

- iLounge is a news and reviews site for all iPhone/iPod related products. I use it often to read reviews of iPod/iPhone accessories like cases, headphones etc… The iPhone version of the site is faster to load, and it presents their many posts in a simple standard iPhone interface. Unfortunately their reviews are presented in chronological order, it is not possible to choose a rating order, or even a review category.

- Amazon has an iPhone version as well, though that’s still in beta. To access it just go to amazon.com on your iPhone. Browsing for items is so easy and fast, each item comes complete with images, reviews and all other details. You can only view or add to your defaul wish list though, which is a big problem for me, since I have 3 different wish lists. It’s also possible to make a purchase from it, though I haven’t tried it yet.

- Revision3 is one of the best video podcast channels. They have a variety of shows with great content. You could (subscribe) download those shows and sync them to your iPhone, or you could watch them streaming from their mobile site m.revision3.com. Works great on Wifi!