Do you know how many people live on Glorioso Island or what type of government Vanuato has? If not, and having this and other information on all countries of the world available all the time is something that appeals to you, you should really consider getting the World Factbook on your Communicator.

After releasing the World Factbook for Nokia 92xx about one year go, JDictionary-Mobile have now released a new version of this application for the Nokia 9300/9500.The World Factbook contains the entire text from CIA World Factbook, which is a reference with a wealth of information about all countries of the world.

For this review I've looked at both the 92xx and the 9300/9500 versions of the World Factbook and at the CIA World Factbook, which is available on the Internet. The 9210 version was reviewed on my own trusted Communicator. For the review of the 9300/9500 version a friend of mine graciously allowed me to use his 9300 for a couple of days (thanks for that!).

The World Factbook was written in Java. I'm usually not a very big fan of Java applications on the Communicator since Java needs a lot of memory to run and most of the time execution is very slow. The memory issue is of course a bigger problem on a 9210, with usually only around 3Mb of execution memory available, than on a 9500 with 30Mb or so. If you have a 9210 and some other applications open, usually Java applications will refuse to start. JDictionary's World Factbook gave me a pleasant surprise though: it's not memory hungry at all. Even on my 9210i with Word, Desk and Extras open, the World Factbook started and ran without any problem.

On a 9210, World Factbook looks like a Java application. This is not JDictionary's fault though; integration of Java on the 9210 just isn't very good. Apart from the obvious Java icon in every window title, there are some other quirks. In text entry fields for example, only the upper half of the text is visible because the text box is not tall enough. Since I've seen this in other Java applications for the 9210 as well, I guess this can't be helped, but it does add to the list of annoyances with Java on a 9210. Java integration on the 9300/9500 is a lot better and the above-mentioned shortcomings are not present. Apart from installing a .JAR file instead of a .SIS file, the World Factbook looks like any other 9300/9500 application.

Sometimes the standard format of displaying information is a little funny – here it looks like they estimated in July 2004 that Glorioso Island was visited by scientists.

After you start the application you'll see the startup screen with information about the program and the registered user. After pressing "Ok" you are transported to the main search screen. Since this is the screen you'll be using most, it would be nice if there were an option to skip the startup screen and go directly to the search screen (after all, I already know the program name and that it's registered to me). The search screen is divided into two parts: the left part contains a list with all the entries and the right part contains the entry texts. On top of the entry list is a search bar. As soon as you start typing, the list shows all matching entries. You can find countries by typing their name or using their ISO, FIPS or Internet codes.

If you select an entry, its main page is displayed on the right side of the screen. This main page contains links to all other pages with information about the selected entry. Next to a map of every country or territory, you’ll find quite detailed information for every single entry (like geography, people, economy, communications, government, military etc.) and sometimes even a few words about how to interpret the data.

You can scroll through the right page with the up and down arrow keys. The left and right arrow keys select the different links on the page. This is not completely standard behavior and takes a little getting used to, but I personally feel this is a good way to navigate through this kind of information. What is a little strange though is that on the 9300/9500 the navigator on the keyboard doesn’t work; you have to use the arrow keys to navigate and press Enter to select a link.

A nice feature is the icon next to every topic title. Selecting this icon causes the entire text of the topic to be placed on the clipboard for use in other applications

If you type a word in the search bar for which there is no exact match in the entry titles, World Factbook will do a fuzzy search. The closest matches for the term you've entered are then displayed. Usually this works pretty well, but sometimes you get some strange results. For example, doing a search on "Neth", did find "Ethiopia" and "Netherlands Antilles", but it didn't find "Netherlands".

Fuzzy search for "nice" returns the most likely results

Currently search and fuzzy search only search the entry titles. Most of the times this is enough, but it would be really useful if the Word Factbook would include functionality to do a free text search in all of the content. For example, searching for "EEC" would display a list of all countries that are in the European Union. Unfortunately, according to JDictionary-Mobile, adding this functionality would double the size of the database and would possibly result in quite a large number of hits, making it very hard to find the information you’re looking for.

Another nice feature would be the possibility to define a filter to show only specific content (for example: show only democracies or show all countries that have an average life expectancy of more than 72 years, etc). Maybe this is an idea for the next release?

I'd never heard of it before, but apparently Vanuatu exists and is a republic

If you've used the 9210 version before you probably won't have any troubles using the 9300/9500 version of the World Factbook since both versions work almost identically. Under the hood it's a complete rewrite, but the end-user only notices this in searching, which is a lot faster on the 9300/9500 version. Oh, and for people that still think the Communicator should have a touch screen, the World Factbook has a virtual cursor (in the 9300/9500 version you can find it in the main menu and on the 9210 you can switch it on if you press Ctrl-Menu and select "Pointer" from the popup menu). This allows you to navigate a pointer/arrow on the screen using the cursor keys and select items with the Enter key.

Since the CIA World Factbook is available on-line and can be freely downloaded for off-line browsing, you might wonder why anyone would shell out the 19 and a half Euros and buy the World Factbook from JDictionary-Mobile. I think there are two good reasons (three if you own a 9210). First of all, the World Factbook by JDictionary Mobile only occupies about 4Mb. If you download the CIA version, the zip file is around 30Mb. Uncompressed it even takes up a whopping 80Mb of MMC space. As far as I can tell, both versions contain the exact same information (I have to admit I didn't read everything so I could be wrong). Packing all this information into only 4Mb is quite an impressive feat. Of course you can always browse information online, but that's generally speaking quite expensive (especially on a 9210 without GPRS) and only works if you can setup an Internet connection (which is kind of hard if you're in an airplane for example).

The second reason is that the user interface of JDictionary's version is much nicer (browsing the CIA World Factbook is not very user friendly) and also includes the possibility to do a non-exact search (although this doesn't always work like you expect, as I mentioned above).

Last but not least, on a 9210 if you use the built-in browser to browse the CIA version of the World Factbook, all other applications are closed, due to the limited memory of the 9210. With JDictionary's version of the World Factbook on the 9210, I was able to write this review in Word, make screenshots from the running World Factbook and examine them in the Imaging application all at the same time without running into memory problems.

Communications in America

If you still doubt it’s worth the money you can download the full version from JDictionary-Mobile’s web site. As long as it’s not registered it will function in demo mode. This essentially means it ignores what you were really looking for and does a random search when you press the Enter key (I personally think this is a creative way of making the full version available for evaluation purposes). At this gives you the opportunity to get a good idea about how the application works, before you buy it. For entertainment purposes the random search is still included in the registered version as an option in the main menu.

I think JDictionary-Mobile did a great job packing all this content in such an exceptionally small package. The user interface works well, searching is pretty fast and overall the application performs great, even on a 9210 (which was quite a surprise to me).

What would make the program even more useful is a free text search in all of the content and/or the ability to filter for specific content (doubling the size of the database won’t be a big problem since there are already very high capacity MMC cards available at reasonable prices). Oh, and a small manual would also be helpful - there are still people who like to get assistance in installing and basic operating of the software they buy.