I really don't like things trying to be other things. My phone is a phone. It's not a Japanese translation service powered by the camera on it. Kinda begs the question why I'm in a Japanese restaurant when I can't read.. how did I even know it was a restaurant?

Maybe I can offer a development to the service tho, if you see someone on the street you quite fancy, you can take a picture of them on your cameraphone, it can connect to various social network sites and tell you where they live so you can stalk them using GPS.

Really I shouldn't give these people ideas should I?

Wonder how long it will be before someone actually sues a mobile phone for cybercrime.

"However, the processing required to work out what you just snapped an image of will apparently be done on your network provider’s servers."

In other words this will cost you, even though given mobile storage options nowadays, it needn't...

Another pointless addition to the 'services' provided by mobile phone operators. When will then learn that all we want mobiles for is to, well, communicate with each other?

Having said that, the translation part looks good, even if it is simply a camera, OCR and Babelfish cunningly tied together.

The shopping thing though... every shopping/advertising 'value added' service that the providers have attempted have failed miserably. I don't know why they keep trying.

One of the things that isn't common info about going to HK is, that unless you want to eat Subway or KFC or don't have a handy Chinese speaker handy, you aren't going to have a chance in most local restaurants, as the language on most menus is exclusively Cantonese. Then again, poring over the menu and sending clips back to the translating service isn't exactly going to endear you to most proprietors either.

April 1st?

I vaguely remember something not a million miles from this which was going to turn your mobile's camera into a 2D barcode reader and the barcodes would be everywhere, posters, magazines, you name it.

The technology was such a great success that I can't even remember anything to uniquely search for.

And now the pseudo-IPO VC-burners want their backers to believe that in the era of Web2.0, a server-based technology can do what barcodes couldn't, based on freeform text?

I doubt it very much, unless the technology is actually a farm of callcentre slaves (or distributed equivalent) who will be looking at the pictures, translating "manually", and responding accordingly. Hmm, that'll work.

Ho hum.

While I was on business in Hong Kong and Tokyo on business, I rented phones with cameras built in so I could take pictures of things on menus and at the grocery store. I would email the picture to a co-worker in the local office who would call/mail me back and tell me what it was in English. The scanning helps a great deal since character input by keyboard is impossible if you don't know what the character is in the first place.

Yes, there are restaurants that don't have English and the hosts speak no English whatsoever; those little hole-in-the-wall places, they never see tourists so they don't bother with English.

It would be useful in NYC as well, there are often items in French and Italian menus I don't recognize, especially when chefs get creative and add obscure ingredients. Would be great to have a translator built into something I carry with me all the time.

@Andrew

Guess you don't know anything about Japanese, or even Chinese.

There are also another 73 characters for basic Japanese called Hiragana, and another 73 characters for English based words callled Katakana. Every kid learns those 146 characters in grade school. Beyond that, there is Kanji, where there's around 2000 common characters that most adults can read. And another 8000 uncommon characters, which sometimes includes subtext in Hiragana so people can read it. You can also use Chinese characters in Japanese, so add the 6000 common Chinese characters, and 30,000 uncommon Chinese characters. There are often characters you have to guess at from the context if there is no sub-text included.

So this feature would be helpful to not only to the relatively small group of business travelers and students, but to the huge number of native Japanese and Chinese speakers.

"I vaguely remember something not a million miles from this which was going to turn your mobile's camera into a 2D barcode reader and the barcodes would be everywhere, posters, magazines, you name it."

We have this in Japan for years, the 2D barcodes are on most things. If you take a photo of the barcode with your kaitei it will normally translate into a URL where you get more information.

"We have this in Japan for years, the 2D barcodes are on most things. If you take a photo of the barcode with your kaitei it will normally translate into a URL where you get more information."

Probably faster & easier to just give a URL.

"It would be useful in NYC as well, there are often items in French and Italian menus I don't recognize, especially when chefs get creative and add obscure ingredients. Would be great to have a translator built into something I carry with me all the time."

Na. Thats not being creative. I do speek French and Italian (not very well) but so often these things arnt worth knowing about, it is just a posh way of saying "I added some seasoning" or "I grated it"...

Just remeber that most places that do that are just being prats, trying to look like they are clever to hide avrage cooking.