Even though our phones and their almost-unlimited functions are nothing short of amazing, we’ve grown rather jaded and hard to impress. But every once in a while there’s a new app that absolutely blows our minds. Word Lens uses the iPhone’s camera to translate between English and Spanish in an almost freakishly futuristic display of augmented reality.
Just point your iPhone at a sign or other printed material and the app magically translates whatever’s there in real time. The app even goes so far as to replace the words in the original image with the translated words in the same colors and font. The result is a totally wondrous toy that you’ll never want to put down…or, you know, a useful tool for when you’re traveling.
The Word Lens app itself is free, but if you want to do any translating you’ll have to pay $5 each for the Spanish-English and English-Spanish translation packs. But once you’ve bought the translation packs you can magically transform text even when you’re offline (not in a wi-fi hotspot or within a cell phone service area), making this one ridiculously awesome purchase that you’ll use