WikiReader

Not to be outdone by the worldliness of Sharp’s new e-Dictionary, Openmoko, the makers of the WikiReader, today announced downloadable updates for the palm-sized encyclopedia to support 14 additional languages including Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Norwegian, Greek, French, Finnish, Danish, Dutch, German, Spanish, Welsh, Russian and Hungarian.  In addition to translated versions of the WikiReader’s 3 million articles, the device’s virtual keyboard will update to support each language’s character set.

We still don’t really see the point of the WikiReader amongst a world of Internet connected smartphones.  But for $99, having a AAA-battery powered encyclopedia of the world’s collective knowledge stored away in a safe spot could be helpful in an apocalypse.