WolframAlpha launched its iPhone App

The application is pretty advanced, as its $49.99 price-tag suggests. Before your jaw drops over the price, keep in mind that this is much more than just a mobile version of the website. It’s a high end graphing calculator (that supports discrete number theory, Calculus derivative and plotting of functions), an almanac, a currency/unit converter and a pretty sophisticated stock analysis tool. And that’s just the beginning.

The buzz over Wolfram Alpha has always centered around its potential. After all, combining statistical, factual and scientific information with human-language requests is an impressive feat. However, actually showcasing the use cases for that potential has been difficult.

With the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app, the company has not only showed off what is capable with the API, but it has delivered a very good example of what is possible with the ever-increasing data engine that backs Wolfram Alpha’s core.

For instance, check out this query from the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app. Here, I typed in “MSFT vs. apple vs. IBM” and what I get back is a very high-level comparison of the companies’ financial data. Stock price, overall market cap, P/E ratios and graphs showing off revenue and stock performance are displayed quickly and in a very, very readable way.

The Wolfram Alpha iPhone app has one of the best mortgage calculators I’ve ever used. You can enter in the amount of your loan, your interest rate and the time on your loan and get a breakdown of your monthly payment, total amount of interest paid and total paid for the house. You can also choose an adjustable-rate mortgage and control the loan or sale amount and other options like taxes, balloon payment info and an interest-only period.

Then, Wolfram Alpha runs a mortgage simulation showing what different low, medium or high interest rate scenarios (for an adjustable-rate mortgage), for instance.

The mathematical functions of the Wolfram Alpha app are in a league of their own. When the Wolfram team told me that the app could replace a graphing calculator, I was a bit skeptical, because I have experience using high-end $150+ calculators in high school and college, and I wasn’t sure that the data output would be as robust.

I was wrong. For students who already have an iPhone or iPod touch who need a graphing calculator for a high school or college math class — this $50 iPhone app might just save you money and give you more options (but make sure you can use it in class and that you have an Internet or data connection available to you).

These examples only scratch the surface of what the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app can do. The application can display demographic and census information, population data, do unit conversions, solve Physics and Chemistry equations and provide information on chemical compounds, and even show domain information.

At $50, this app is not for everyone. From my uses, students in advanced math classes (I would have killed for this in high-school and I had a TI-89, which was the super-calculator of its time), people who do lots of data analysis, financial analysts (really analysts of almost any kind) are the most likely to find this application useful. The mathematical and scientific information is really outstanding and it’s pretty mind-blowing the sorts of data you can extrapolate and the sorts of information that you can get back. [Mashable]

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