Some applications make more sense on the iPad, some don’t. When I first reviewed Articles from Sophiestication in its iPhone version, I said it was the best Wikipedia app for iPhone out there. I still think it is, as no other application has managed to get even near to the sheer amount of quality Sophia has put into that tiny Wikipedia client. But one could argue whether the iPhone is any good for reading, and that’s a complete different story. Once you try an iPad, you realize how much it is better for reading and consuming content than the iPhone, which is meant for accessing that content on the go.
As you try an iPad you realize how much a previously iPhone-only application makes more sense on it, and Articles is no exception.
If you’re into the whole Wikipedia thing and you have an iPad, then I guess you’ve rediscovered how great is to read Wikipedia when you have some free time. You start reading an article, then you click on a link and jump to another one and so on. Soon you realize you’ve spent three hours reading everything about the Pink Floyd and you go back to tweet something about the iPad. It happened.
Articles for iPad uses the larger screen real estate to display more content and make everything more readable and easy to the eyes, and it also makes a clever use of popovers and such to help you navigate through menus and bookmarks. The interface is, as Sophia’s tradition, stunning, with a wooden background and a good looking fabric texture for the actual entries. It’s nice to hold Articles in your hands. And unlike someone said some weeks ago, it doesn’t look like a “feminine” app at all.
The app itself is pretty straightforward: you can read Wikipedia articles, open multiple Safari-like pages at once for every link you stumble upon, add an entry to your bookmarks and create folders. Pretty much like the iPhone version, it’s easy to organize articles and it’s easy to retrieve them later. You can open the images embedded in articles and this iPad iteration also makes a better use of the Wikipedia right sidebar with all the info about a specific entry.
Articles for iPad has some flaws though, and Sophia noticed it and decided go drop the price to .99 to justify the bugs and glitches. She’s working on it, but if you purchase it you’ll see that pages don’t scroll smoothly as on the iPhone and that sometimes it seems to hang when you increase or decrease the font size. Not a big deal, anyway.
Articles for iPad is good. It has to be improved, but for just 99 cents in the App Store I think it’s a huge deal to buy it now. Go download.
