Every now and then an App comes along that makes me say "Whoa! How the heck did they do that?" Word Lens is the most recent one that left me speechless. I got an email from my buddy Colin Fleming suggesting that I take a look at this App. Now I get those kinds of emails daily from developers and friends. A quick look at the description and I went ahead and downloaded it since it was "Free". What I expected to happen next was that I would fire up the App and then take a picture of something and it wold translate it. It was at that point that I said, "holy S#$t!!!" I held my iPhone 4 up to a sign in my car dealership and it started translating the sign IN REAL-TIME without having to take a picture. OMG!!!! Not only did it translate the text, but it did so in place matching the size of the font and characters. Again, OMG!!! I don't speak Spanish, so I can't verify how good the translation is, but again OMG!!! Rather than continuing trying to explain it, here's a clip showing it in action:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQdYrHRs
It's AMAZING How Far Technology Has Come
I can't get over the fact of the way this thing works and it's doing it from a freakin' phone in my hand. OK, I've calmed down a bit. Now for a few details. First off the way they've set up this App is that you download it for free, but what you get for free is really just a demo. It will do the translation "backwards" so that you can see it work. If you like it and then want to use it the way it was intended to be used, you then do an in-app purchase of the languages you want to convert. Currently it only supports English to Spanish and Spanish to English. Each translation language is a $4.99 purchase. In other words if you want to do bi-directional translations it will cost you $10. While I don't have an issue with the price, I do have a slight issue with the model. I would prefer to see a "lite" version for free or ad sponsored that perhaps translates one language in one direction. Then if you like it, you can do the in-app purchase for the other direction and to turn off the ads. There's nothing technically wrong with their current model, it's just that people will download this expecting to be able to use it as is and you really can't unless you make a purchase. Otherwise, bring it on! Give me more language choices and I'll be an in-app purchasing son of a gun.
Once you've locked in on what you want translated you can FREEZE the image. It seems to be geared and small amounts of text (like signs) as opposed to paragraphs. I can definitely see lots of use cases for this technology. I showed it to my car dealer (a non techie guy) and his first response was, Wow! that would be great in a restaurant for the menu. As someone who travels globally for a living I can see this thing being used all over the freakin place. Perhaps next time I won't accidentally walk into the ladies room in Germany (you guys really do need graphical signs) 
You can get Word Lens for FREE here from the 
When I travel sometimes I just can't get a direct flight. Although I live in a Delta hub city, Delta doesn't fly everywhere from where I live. This is especially the case internationally and connecting internationally is usually a little more frustrating because the airports don't usually have as many flight boards as domestic airports do. As a result I have to hustle to the closet board or tackle an airline rep to see which gate my connecting flight is going out of. This is where the FlightBoard App comes in. FlightBoard covers just about every airport in the world and as the name implies it displays the current flight board with arrival and departure status for the airport of your choice.
Yesterday American Airlines released a GREAT NEW APP for iPhone and other iOS devices. The App is extremely well done. It offers the things you would expect like the ability to log into your frequent flyer account, see your upcoming flights, check schedules and book new flights, see terminal maps, and get push notifications of departure times and gate changes. That's all great! There are several other travel Apps out there that do similar things. Where the American Airlines App goes beyond the basics is that it lets you track your Elite status progress, it lets you get your electronic boarding pass right in the App and most importantly it lets you check your place on the upgrade/standby list. These are the kinds of things that only a native Airlines App can offer. They even threw in a AA Sudoku Game. That's thinking outside of the box. Who else gives you a game to play in their business app for those times while you'll have to wait? Very clever idea! They even built in a feature that lets you snap a pic of your car and add a quick note to help you remember where you parked after a long trip. The developer of this App gets it!