[New App] Attopedia Is A Surprisingly Good Way To Browse Wikipedia On Android Wear

It seems like one out of every four searches I make sends me to Wikipedia for one thing or another – for example, the metric prefix atto- means 10 to the negative eighteenth power, or one quintillionth, or really quite amazingly bloody small. Google itself defaults to a lot of Wikipedia pages for its Knowledge Graph info, and you’ll get small cards full of Wikipedia content for many searches from Android Wear. But developer Dheera Venkatraman (whose previous Wear apps Wear Camera Remote and Matrix face we’ve already written about) has an even better solution.

Attopedia is a surprisingly effective Wear app for browsing full Wikipedia pages. Its novelty comes from the nested navigation (see above). You execute a voice search to get to a specific Wikipedia page, then swipe down to browse through the various sections, which are given photo backgrounds where available. Swipe left again to advance through sub-sections. This structure makes it easy to get to the information you want, even on a page with thousands of words, without pulling out your phone.

  

The app is a solid alternative to the rather truncated cards that Google’s own Search actions bring up on Wear, and like Venkatraman’s other Wear apps, it’s free. Right now it loads pages a little slowly in my testing, probably because it’s caching all the images on the page in the background. Here’s hoping that can be addressed in a timely update.