Wolfram Alpha for iPhone Drops price by 96 percent
Wow, that’s some price drop. The Wolfram Alpha recently went from the $50 Ultra Double Somersault Premium price range down to the Double Fart Apps Plus price of $1.99 (news via Lifehacker). This is not a sale, but a permanent price drop. The computational search engine also announced that “early adopters” are eligible for a refund: all you have to do is request one. However, if two dollars is still two too much to pay for something you haven’t tried, Wolfram Alpha has also released a free mobile site you can check out.
I’ve never used Wolfram Alpha in my life, but with this generous new movement towards ubiquity, I might just give it a shot. The service is apparently great for asking very specific questions about objective data and display answers in a way that Google simply can’t manage right now – although at first glance it looks to me like a usage mix of Wikipedia and Google.
Anybody here actually buy the full $50 app? Was it worth it?
Ha – you beat me to this story. I just bought the app a little while ago – hoping it may come in handy for some of the tough questions my 7 year old daughter fires at me. Google is of course already my / our friend for those, but this app looks like it may be a good supplement to it.
you gonna get your refund?
No – I never paid the absurd $50 price. I bought it a little while ago this morning, for $1.99.
IF you can figure out how to properly phrase your inquiries, Wolfram Alpha can do an amazing job of finding and presenting data. All Google can do is show you what exists. Wolfram Alpha takes data and presents it in ways you want – you can ask it for statistical data, such as per capita income or lifespan for a list of countries (or all countries) and it gives you back the list and the information presented as a graph.
If you ask for per-capita income in the U.S. and Canada in Google, you'll get lots of sources that might list one, or the other, or both. If you add two or three more countries, you get a mess. In Wolfram, you get the data you asked for, integrated and displayed graphically as well as a link to the sources.
It's also great for doing calculus. Give it something like: ∫(x^2*e^x, x) and it'll show you the result of evaluating the indefinite integral, some graphs, other information and the steps it took to evaluate.