I just saw this app called Pictranslator that has you take a picture of text and then translates it for you. it's free and seems to work ok. Has anyone else played with it?

Not free, but comes with one free language and you can purchase others fairly inexpensively. I picked it up on a lark and for my one included translator, picked Spanish.

I printed out a sheet in Spanish from a web site and took a picture on an iPhone 3Gs and sure enough, after about 20-30 seconds, it translated it pretty darn well.

My only nits:

The font in the translated text is really big, so it isn't a very smooth read, and the formatting is all gone, so it lumped in all the text into almost a long stream.

Additional languages cost additional $$. Not a lot, and I suppose that is a reasonable expectation.

It requires an internet connection, prefereably a fast one to upload the picture you took for translation. If you are in Spain, for example, that could be some crazy data roaming fees for very much usage.

I picked it up just because I thought from a geeky standpoint, it was crazy cool, more of a novety. The example they give of being in a French resturant and using it to translate the menu showed it off well.

Anyone try it with the 3G? The 3G S's higher resolution camera and ability to focus seems to help it take pictures of text much clearer than the 3G's camera. I'd suspect the app would have a much harder time translating things (at least close-up, small-font things, like menus) from pictures taken by the 3G's camera.

That could be painful.