Google Goggles

Recently I took the plunge and got myself a Droid smartphone, touted as Verizon's answer to the iPhone. It's seriously cool, and has a lot of features that are simply jaw-dropping compared to the regular cel phone I had before, which was anything but "smart."

But of course, the thing that comes up most often when people ask about it is if it's better than the iPhone. Never having owned one, I'm not really able to stack them up fairly, but one of the things you immediately notice when you're working with your Android phone is that while there are all sorts of "apps" available for you to download and use -- the variety is severely lacking.

Or to put it another way, when my iPhone-having friends find out that I have access to apps, they all suggest that I download their favorites for my own use, and in many cases they don't seem to be available.

It's a minor hassle, and one that in time I'm sure will disappear as the android market continues to grow -- but as useful as the Droid clearly is capable of being, the number of applications that help you get use from it for the time being aren't as numerous as it's Apple counterpart.

As such, there's a bit of a "cool factor" gap -- at least when it comes to apps. Or at least there was, before this thing came out.



Maybe I'm easily impressed, but the fact that this thing works (I have it on my phone) is endlessly amazing to me. Take a picture of something, wait a second, and then the system recognizes it and searches for related information on that item.

My phone can literally see things and search for them.

It's not a jetpack. But it's pretty frikkin close.