Cool Thing Of The Day: Smartphone Auto-Translation

The speed of development on the mobile platform these days could, if I had the time and energy, create a "cool thing" post every single day on some amazing new mobile device, application, or feature. (Witness this recent post on the $10 cameraphone microscope.)

TransPerfect TransImage is a free iPhone app that translates the text within pictures that you take with your camera. According to the developer's site, "Letters within images are pulled out, translated, and returned to the phone, so you can understand signs, menus and books written in other languages."

Add this to the Google Wave platform's simultaneous type-to-translate feature and it makes one wonder -- will there soon come a day when studying languages will become a thing of the past? When our phones will speak for us? (Or, just talk to each other?)

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