Windows Phone Thoughts: The World in Your Pocket – Lexipedia 1.1 for Pocket PC

Getting Your Money’s Worth
I don’t remember ever doing this before in a review, but I felt the variation in pricing available for this product was worth mentioning. As noted above, the purchase price for Lexipedia is 19.99 USD from Handango ($17.99 if you’re a Handango club member). On the Revolutionary Software Front website however, if you are willing to use a Visa or Mastercard you can pick up Lexipedia for 14.99 USD. And, there is a link provided on the same page to another e-commerce vendor called KAGI who will sell it to you for 13.99 USD. I’m all for competitive pricing, but I was kind of expecting there to be a least a bit more consistency, especially for links provided by the developer.

Look-Up / Search
Searching for information from the database is simple and easy. Just type in the area of interest in the box at the top of the screen and tap ‘Go’.


Figure 2: Main search screen of Lexipedia (full version).

Depending upon the precision of your request, you’ll be presented with a list of articles from which to choose. If you’re not sure of the spelling, just provide something that is relatively close, and a ‘sounds like’ algorithm employed within Lexipedia’s search engine will take its best guess.


Figure 3: Here’s what happens when you don’t get the spelling right.

The search engine is not quite as forgiving as Wikipedia’s. As shown below, typing in ‘boxers’ provided a relatively short list of articles, focused mainly on people involved in the sport of Boxing.


Figure 4: I was thinking of underwear!!

Performing the same search in Wikipedia retrieved articles about underwear, Chinese Rebels, and a breed of dog (to name a few). The solution was to simply remove the plural and change the search to ‘Boxer’. This time Lexipedia retrieved the exact same material as Wikipedia.


Figure 5: Taking out the plural gives a more complete response.

Article Content
No pictures or graphics are included in the articles to keep the overall size of the product to something that is manageable and usable. As stated on their website, Revolutionary Software Front has included just the summary sections, or the beginnings of articles in the abridged version, in order to make Lexipedia a manageable size. This means that typically, articles will include between 3 and 4 paragraphs of information, highlighting the major points. Unfortunately, in some of the longer articles, they will simply stop mid-sentence which is a bit distracting, to say the least!