CBS Interactive has launched an official Star Trek PADD application for the iPad. The 190-MB program contains a browsable library of Star Trek information presented with a distinctive user interface modeled after the Federation’s LCARS software environment. And because we’re Star Trek nerds, we thought we’d take a look. You know, for science.

The information that users can read in the PADD application appears to be the same that is hosted in the database on the official StarTrek.com website. The database entries are organized into categories, which include characters, species, vessels, places and episodes. It draws details from all canonical Star Trek sources, including the movies, television shows and animated series.

Selecting a category will cause the application to display a massive alphabetical list of associated entries, which unfortunately isn’t particularly comfortable for casual browsing. There doesn’t appear to be a way to further filter a category by other parameters. I wanted to be able to browse the episode list by show and season, for example, but such functionality isn’t provided.

Does Everyone Know About This Grain but Me?

The breadth of the database is fairly impressive — it has entries on a wide range of topics, including some that are highly obscure or only mentioned in passing during the series. For example, there is an entry about coffee (they still drink copious amounts of it in the 24th century, especially Captain Janeway) and Bob Hope (a favorite of the 22nd-century Enterprise crew).

Despite the breadth, we noticed a few odd omissions. The character section of the database, for example, has a lengthy entry about Porthos — Captain Archer’s pet beagle — but sadly lacks an entry about Spot, Data’s pet cat. Another very serious and disappointing oversight is the lack of an entry about quadrotriticale, a high-yield hybrid of wheat and rye.

The individual entries tend to be concise and less encyclopedic than the equivalent entries at community-driven resources like Memory Alpha and Wikipedia. The style and format of the PADD database entries make the application handy for simple reference, but it’s much less useful than the wikis if you want more substantial background information and insight into historical events of the Star Trek canon.

The longer entries have some basic cross-linking so that you can dig into other entries, but not nearly to the same extent as Memory Alpha. Similarly, it has less supporting graphical media. There is at least one thumbnail for most of the episodes, but a lot of the other informational entries lack images.

For example, the entry about warp drive, which consists of only four sentences, has no graphical accompaniment. By comparison, the equivalent entry at Memory Alpha has a complete history of human and Federation warp technology development and several images.

The Truth Is Just an Excuse for a Lack of Imagination

In addition to information about the Star Trek universe, the database also has entries about actors, writers and other people who were involved in the making of the show. This is useful if you happen to be watching Total Recall and want to check the entry about Marc Alaimo to confirm your suspicion that your favorite Cardassian megalomaniac is in the ’90s Schwarzenegger flick. Seriously, Gul Dukat and Captain Jellico (Senator Kinsey, for the Gaters) appearing in the same movie is more than a little bit creepy.

On the other hand, the fact that the application basically breaks out of character by including entries about real-world topics might disappoint the Star Trek purists.

The application has a built-in search feature that allows you to type in a query with the iPad’s on-screen keyboard. The application will display entries that match the query. The search feature worked relatively well, but the standard iPad keyboard looks terribly out of place in the LCARS environment.

I Love Classic Century Design!

The application’s real novelty is the presentation, which is designed to mimic Star Trek consoles. The LCARS graphical elements are used effectively, but there are a lot of superfluous animated elements that have no functional behavior in the context of the application.

This makes it difficult at times to know which parts of the screen are user interface elements and which are just flashy embellishments that were added to contribute to the Star Trek aesthetic. Readability is also negatively impacted by the eccentric layout and narrow fonts. But let’s face it: Nobody wants an LCARS interface for the usability — it’s all about the atmosphere.

In addition to the brightly colored curves and other distinctive LCARS visual elements, the application also gives you the sounds of Star Trek. It emits a constant stream of blipping, buzzing and background noise of the kind that you might hear on the bridge of a starship or in main engineering. Some users might find the constant noise distracting, but I found myself intrigued by the soundtrack.

When you tap the screen, the application will respond by playing Majel Barret voice clips captured from the show (Barret is Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s wife, best known for her roles as Nurse Chapel, Lwaxana Troi and the voice of the ship’s computer).

The audio clips are used rather loosely in the application, sometimes with comical results. Tapping a part of the screen that is nonfunctional will result in a negative response selected at random. One that comes up infrequently is “this unit is not a replicator.” I laugh every time.

If you stop using the application and let it idle for a little while, it will switch into a sort of screensaver mode that rotates between a map of the Enterprise-D and what looks vaguely like an animated warp core diagnostic. You can exit the screen saver by tapping.

Perhaps Today Is a Good Day to Download

The program is an iPad exclusive, which means that it’s probably not coming to the Android platform anytime in the near future. This may tempt Android users to switch to the iPad … for about 0.68 seconds.

The Star Trek PADD application is a fun gimmick, but the $4.99 price is a bit much for what you get. If you are keen on the Ferengi third rule of acquisition (never spend more for an acquisition than you have to), you will find that you can get better value by simply opening a web browser and navigating to Memory Alpha or Wikipedia.

That said, the application is not a bad purchase for a hard-core Star Trek enthusiast who enjoys a little bit of starship atmosphere. As a huge fan, my effort to resist was futile. I think the amusement I got from the voice clips was enough to make it worth the cost and effort of downloading. But that’s just because my neural pathways have become accustomed to those sensory input patterns.

The developers could probably make the application more appealing to a broader base of Trek fans if they threw in more content or decreased the price a little bit. Let’s hope that they make it so.

You can download the PADD app in the App Store.