Price: $0.99 Score: 7/10 Category: Reference
A truly original and unique take on the encyclopedia, Hyper Facts from Developer A2rt is a new iPhone app that features location-based facts.
With Hyper Facts, you can search through a database of over 9 million facts and 40 million relations, and using Google Maps, search for places of interest near you. Encyclopedia entries link to Wikipedia and allow you to read a brief synopsis of the item, or access the full detailed entry.
Hyper Facts is not limited to just learning about what is immediately around you however, as you can search via ‘Things’ for a Person, Location, Event or Work, or via ‘Categories’ to find what you are looking for. These too, link to Wikipedia to retrieve the information so a 3G or WiFi internet connection is a necessity. You can type in the name of a famous person, such as Barack Obama or Steve Jobs, and retrieve the full entry on that person from within the Hyper Facts app.
The ‘Categories’ tab is unfortunately not already populated with items to browse through, so you will need to nominate search categories yourself. If you type in a keyword, such as ‘presidents’ into categories, you are given a list of all Wikipedia articles that feature lists of presidents of various states and organizations.
Hyper Facts is a useful app for discovering points-of-interest near you, but if you don’t live in a city or area with a rich history, there will be a scarcity of Wikipedia entries for you to discover and the app will just identify nearby suburbs on the map. But, for $0.99, Hyper Facts is an original take on the encyclopedia and well worth a look.
Hyper Facts is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.2 or later