WikiReader Takes Wikipedia Offline, Puts It In Your Pocket

With a black-and-white screen, no WI-FI at all, and running on plain old AAA batteries, the Wikireader is the lowest-tech gadget we've gotten this excited about in a long time.

The Wikireader, developed with the help of an ex-Apple designer, was built to allow users to browse all of Wikipedia offline and on-the-go.

For just $99 and with only 3 buttons, Wikireader users can access all of Wikipedia's 3 million topics.

The company explains in its mission statement,

Never forgetting that 75% of the world is offline, we removed all unnecessary elements to reach a low price point. We wanted to contribute, in a small but meaningful way, to Wikipedia's own goal of providing a "free encyclopedia to everyone on the planet, written in their native language". We never saw WikiReader as a programmatic project, but rather as something intuitive and spontaneous. Making something "new" played a less important role than the "transformation" of something preexisting.

Look how far we've come. See this

versus this: