Have you tried the Google Goggles app? It’s amazing. Flippin’ amazing! I mean really, really mind bogglingly, unbelievably… amazing. You have to try it if you’ve got an Android phone.

Err, so what is it? It’s sort of a reverse image search look-up. Take a picture with your phone’s camera and the app tries to recognise the image and return search results. Apparently if you’re out and about you can take a picture of a landmark and it’ll try to tell you about it. For best results activate GPS so Google knows roughly where you are.

I haven’t tried the geo-location functionality yet (it’s 11.30pm, it’s dark and I’m at home) but just taking a couple of photos of books and CD covers convinced me of its genius. In every case the item was recognised in a couple of seconds. If you’re cynical (like my GF) you’ll assume it’s just performed some simple OCR function – but no – cover the text and it works just as rapidly.

So, anyway, it’s good. Try it.

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