There are plenty of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) apps out there for iOS and Android that’ll snap pictures and then convert the image to text, in most foreign languages. But Pleco brings it a step further by doing it in real time, live! Damn useful when you got yourself a Chinese girlfriend, or is heading China for some business. Pleco can translate text in real time using the live image presented on your phone’s camera display. However, I doubt it’ll work well if the background’s exposure is too low, or the handwriting is awful.

Pleco 2.2 is heading your way in September, and requires iOS 4. Should work well with any iPhone that has iOS 4 loaded. Yeah, that means your good ol’ iPhone 3G too. Check out how it works in the video below.

SOURCE via Engadget]