TiniWiki places the entire world's information in your iPhone

Leonard Goh | Jun 17, 2009

TiniWiki on the iPhone. It can display information in other languages such as Thai and Chinese also. (Credit: Leonard Goh/CNET Asia)

The CommunicAsia 2009 tradeshow held at Singapore Expo is not just phones and gadgets. With the rising influence of the iTunes App Store for the iPhone and iPod touch, software developers are churning out more applications for the consumers.

Nicta, an Australian research center for communications technology, was at the tradeshow to show off its latest iPhone app, the TiniWiki. This program uses a unique algorithm which not only compresses XML data, but it is able to read such information without uncompressing it. Hence, is also able to shrink the whole of Wikipedia (about 30GB) to approximately 6GB and this can be stored on the iPhone or iPod touch. By doing so, you can search for information offline as well. For some users, this may be a huge bonus. But with prices of mobile data plans dropping, some may wonder if the 6GB of space required can be put to better use.

The application itself is about 1.4MB, and once activated, it prompts you to download the database. Since 6GB is by no means small even for broadband connections, Dr Terence Percival, laboratory director for Nicta, suggests that you leave the handset on overnight to download the database.

There is a free app called Wikiamo that lets you access information from Wikipedia as well, but you'll need an Internet connection to do so.

TiniWiki costs US$5.99 on the App Store, and is available for download now.

Filed under: Mobile Phones
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