Wikihood is the most knowledgeable, readily accessible and least annoying tour guide you will ever meet. Whether you’re living in a big city or small town, Wikihood combines your geographic location with Wikipedia data to show you important sites in your area, what spots others have found interesting, historical events that took place nearby, and famous people that have been linked to your area. Wikihood is an impressive, smooth and brilliantly designed app that’s absolutely essential for all iPad owners to download.

When you first load Wikihood, either choose to manually enter a location or allow the app to automatically access your geographic location. Within seconds of determining your location, alongside high resolution photos, Wikihood loads an expandable list of popular sites and information for your neighborhood. On the navigation bar, filter listings by sorting through nearest distance, highest relevance based on what users have voted or commented on, highest ratings, or view landmarks in a Google Map view with push-pin markers at all points of interests in your locale.

To find more details, simply click through each item and Wikihood pulls in more and more Wikipedia information for you to digest. Perhaps the best part of the Wikipedia integration is that as you read through things like the history of San Francisco’s Cable Cars, inline links from Wikipedia continue to open articles within the Wikihood app and bypasses any annoying switches to the Safari Browser. For me, this is a big seller as I tend to despise apps that continually send me off app into Safari or the iTunes store.

As for usability, Wikihood has everything you would possibly want to do to extend it’s usage. The app contains font controls, email forwarding, an option to view in Safari, photo viewing and getting directions to a landmark.

The only downside I suppose is that Wikihood will not work as well for travelers who are tied down to WiFi only access. While I would love to bring my iPad with Wikihood on my next trip to Europe, universal WiFi isn’t quite available yet. But eventually, Wikihood with an internet connection could very well replace travel guides, tour guides, and star maps.

Wikihood is a well designed, accessible, fully functional, and smooth running app that every iPad owner needs to download.