Could it be? Is Amazon offering another useful app that I actually want to own for the 2nd day in a row? That's pretty much a first so far, with the Shazam Encore/SwiftKey tag team being a close second. What makes today's deal especially valuable is that there is no free version of Wolfram Alpha at all, so combined with 4.7 stars and over 1,800 reviews in the official Market, getting today's free app right away is pretty much a no-brainer.
When Wolfram Alpha was introduced back in 2009, it sent shockwaves through the Internet and the scientific community due to its incredible artificial intelligence and instant usefulness in myriads of both highly scientific and day-to-day computations. In fact, it was so ground-breaking that Popular Science named it the greatest computer innovation of 2009.
So, what kind of questions can Wolfram Alpha answer? If you haven't played with it before, you may be surprised, shocked, excited, or all of the above.
From Wikipedia:
The following are examples of queries using Wolfram Alpha. They are accompanied by links to the results of each search to illustrate the variety of answers that Wolfram Alpha provides to non-specific queries.
- mortgage 6%, 25 year, $140000 displays, among other things, repayment rates and graphs that represent capital vs. interest over time.
- life expectancy france 25 year old male which gives a survival analysis for a person of the given demographic.
- boiling point of water at 6 atm which returns a phase diagram alongside the result of 432.6 Kelvins.
- lim(x->0) x/sin x yields the expected result, 1, a plot, and the series expansion. The button "show steps" provides a possible derivation of the result using L'Hôpital's rule.
Wolfram Alpha is also capable of responding to increasingly complex, natural-language fact-based questions such as:
- "Where was Mary Robinson born?"
- "How old was Queen Elizabeth II in 1974?"
- "What is the forty-eighth smallest country by GDP per capita?" yields Sao Tome and Principe, $1110 per year.
Also, one can input the name of a website, and it will return relevant information about the site, including its hosting location, site rank, number of visitors and more.
From the app's description:
- Sunset Orlando two months from today
- Skychart at 8:00pm
- Words containing letters mpg
- Weather in Honolulu when Obama was born
- 4th largest child population in Europe
- Distance to moon / length AAA battery
- MSFT vs GM vs Citi
- Integrate x sin x log x
- y'' + sin y = cos x
- Pentane + O2 -> CO2 + water
- Young's modulus AISI 1080 steel
Impressed yet? Yeah, I thought so.
Today, all this knowledge, wrapped in a nice Android interface which usually costs $1.99, is free. Really, there should be no hesitation around scooping Wolfram Alpha up - you'll be surprised how often you'll be using it once it's installed on your device.
Source: WolframAlpha