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Wolfram Alpha launches iPhone app at $50
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 20 October 2009, 15:17 IST
Bangalore: Wolfram Alpha, the 'computational knowledge engine', has until now lived solely as a web site that can provide cool data results to certain queries. Now, it went one step ahead and launched iPhone App in the iTunes App Store at a price of $49.99.
The company is mainly targeting this app at students and professionals and marketing it as a replacement for stand-alone graphing calculators, which is clearly reflected in the price. One of the most interesting features of the app, besides the ability to quickly access all of the power that Wolfram Alpha now offers, is the fact that the company has found a way to make input queries very easy. Instead of a single keyboard at the bottom of the screen, the app actually displays two keyboards - one for numbers and symbols, and a regular QWERTY keyboard at the bottom of the screen. Given the nature of a typical query for Alpha, this makes perfect sense and we hope that others will follow Alpha's lead here.
With the $50 price point, you get access to all of the knowledge that the web site searches today. You can ask Wolfram Alpha to compute plain-language problems as diverse as 'mother's father's nephew' or 'Nine years six months twelve days from yesterday' or even population density U.S. vs France." You can also feed it mathematical queries that, frankly, I can barely understand, like 'taylor series x^2 sin^3(x)', and that's the kind of question that you need answered wherever you are, on the go.
The app, which requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later, displays Wolfram Alpha's standard high-quality charts and graphs, with the overall experience customized for the iPhone.