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Comment by mootothemax | Hacker News Reader

I think there's definitely a gap in the market for something a bit simpler: there have been a good number of times when I've been stumped by a word or two in a sentence (in Polish) written on something in the street, and have resorted to taking a cameraphone photo and translating later when at home.

Sadly, as I'd love to have a play, the app store says that it's incompatible with my cheapo ZTE blade.

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I'm not surprised. It has a very slow processor, and for this kind of processing you need a lot of power. In fact, I think the (original?) developer of Word Lens said he first made it in Assembly to make it fast enough even for an iPhone 4.

Plus, your phone is also on the ARMv6 architecture, and for the kind of optimization they need to do, they didn't want to bother with that older architecture.

For the record right now I have a phone with a similar processor as well, but planning on switching to a Nexus this fall.

Yep, that's correct, critical sections of the pipeline are coded in assembly. Also, Word Lens only works with Android devices that have NEON support.

That needs to be explained somewhere obvious. On the market page it only tells me the app is incompatible with my device, giving me no clue what to get that would run it (except for the OS versions, which my device satisfied).

We considered publishing a list of minimum requirements but we encountered phones that for whatever reason wouldn't work even though the hardware met the minimum requirements. For example, the Nexus One and HTC Evo both had low frame rates despite adequate hardware.

Not compatible with the n1 either which is pretty rare. I wonder why...

We ran into performance issues on the N1 that made for a very poor experience. In testing, the N1 oddly worked fine when we replaced the stock firmware with Cyanogen. That would have really confused users though so we had to blacklist the N1.

It isn't compatible with my Droid X either, which surprised me. Play doesn't tell me why, which is inconvenient.

Really? It's compatible with my Droid X.

We haven't blacklisted the Droid X. Can you let us know what kind of problems you're seeing?

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