Want to start browsing the world, as well as the web? A new edition of the grandly named Wikitude World Browser, complete with a search function, bookmarks and even a history tab, is about to be launched by mobilizy.com of Salzburg, Austria. This week I have been testing a near-final version of the World Browser, which is essentially an elaborate augmented reality app, on my G1 Android handset. At least in London, the World Browser gives you access to loads of useful information about your immediate surroundings, but it can be quite cumbersome to use and I hope the final version will be slicker.

When you fire up the app, it connects to a server, taking about 10 seconds or so to draw down a summary of local "points of interest", segmented by content provider, which can include Yelp, Booking.com, Google, Wikipedia, Twitter feeds and many others. You then select the content providers you are interested in and the app takes another 10 seconds to sync your choices with the server.  (There is also a social element - you can select content from Wikitude.me, which captures geo-tagged contributions posted on the wikitude.me web site).

You then raise your camera phone to show the world, labelled with floating tags marking the points of interest around you, in the viewfinder.  Each tag carries the content provider's logo, but often only part of the name of the point of interest and they can overlap, making them more difficult to read. Annoyingly, the bottom left corner of the screen is sometimes also obscured by the logo of one of the content providers, such as Google.

In a coffee shop in Kennington, an inner city suburb of London, the app suggested 50 points of interest (the maximum it can show at any one time) from five different content providers. I selected Google, Wikipedia and Wikitude.me, which produced a flock of floating tags, two of which were marked "The Lock.." and "Imperial" respectively.

Is it a gym, is it a bar, is it a beauty parlour?

If you touch the tag, the full name of the point of interest appears together with an address, telephone number and its distance from your current location. For example, the Imperial War Museum turned out to be 900 metres away from where I was sitting. However, it still isn't always clear what kind of establishment you are looking at.  "The Lock.." was revealed to be "The Locker Room," but the information box didn't tell me whether it was a gym, a bar, a beauty parlour or whatever.

Of course, there is also a link to a web page carrying more information (typically including consumer reviews) from the content provider, as well as a handy link from which you can phone the establishment's number or send them an email. Incidentally, Wikitude.me only listed one point of interest in Kennington, which was London's Metropolitan University - City Campus, four kilometres away.  

I used the World Browser's built-in search function to try and find a local barber.  Up popped scores of tags, but some of them linked to barbers several kilometres away.  You can filter the results by distance, but the slider you use to do this is difficult to set precisely.

In summary, the Wikitude World Browser can pull up an impressive volume of content (probably because the mark-up language it uses is based on that used by Google Earth), but the user interface needs to be refined further to make it quicker to get to the actual info you are after. Right now, there are too many steps.

These kinds of world browsers are obviously going to be very useful to tourists and will probably eventually replace the traditional printed guide book, but only if the mobile ecosystem can overcome two significant obstacles. Firstly, they consume a lot of battery life, presumably because they make extensive use of the handset's GPS chip and mobile network connection. Secondly, data roaming charges - these apps are going to be most useful when you are abroad and that's when browsing the world could get very expensive.