Word Lens, an app that translates English text to and from Spanish on the fly, is a reminder of just how powerful apps can be. But how's it really work? It ain't perfect, but it's still pretty damn amazing.
I pointed Word Lens at all the Spanish I could find—the taco truck down the street, a Spanish-language newspaper, some signs on Google Street View and Google images—and I have to say that I was pretty amazed by how well it performed. Sure, sometimes words jump around like shapeshifters on crack, translating and retranslating rapidly as you jiggle the camera. And of course the translations are just done word by word, resulting in broken sentences that rarely have any semblance of correct syntax. But if you come into it with your expectations in check, Word Lens is still a terrific feat in mobile computing, even if its futuristic WOW quotient is, for now, a bit greater than its real world usefulness.
App of the Day: Word Lens for iPhone (http://gizmodo.com/5714696/video-the-iphone-app-from-the-future-people-cant-stop-talking-about)