Tired of your old search engine and looking for something different?  It may not be Wolfram Alpha...

Released earlier this week, www.wolframalpha.com takes firm aim at being a new kind of search engine - although perhaps not a 'google-killer'.

The product is the latest offering from Wolfram Research, the company founded and named after the math and computing genius, Stephen Wolfram - best known for the software 'Mathematica'. 

Wolfram Alpha isn't a search engine as such.  Self described as a 'computational knowledge engine', it doesn't respond to a user's search text by displaying a list of relevant web page.  Rather, Wolfram Alpha relies upon it's own database of facts and figures - quantitative data which is 'computable.'

So, how does it all work out?

Typing the words "Apple, IBM" into Wolfram Alpha is interpreted by the software as a request for information on the two companies - resulting in a comparison between both organisations - just the facts. The same text input to Google returns a page of web links - at the time of publication of this new article the top result was a page on Apple Inc.'s website regarding their partnership with IBM.

Wolfram Alpha aspires to 'collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.'  So, Alpha sounds brilliant if you're working with stats, equations, formulas and other types of raw data - but if you need to order a pizza, or find an opinion on the latest film showing at your local cinema then Google looks still firmly rooted as being the search engine of choice.

iPhone software 3.0 gets 'cut, copy and paste'... (finally!)...

Apple Corportion announced earlier today that the new version (3.0) of the iPhone operating system - available to consumers this summer - will finally have 'cut, copy and paste'.

Many users who purchased the Apple iPhone were shocked to find that the device didn't have a 'cut copy and paste' feature - preventing users from doing things like copying bits of text from emails for example - and pasting them into another document or application window.  Windows Mobile has always had this capability.

Apple maintained that the function was not built into the iPhone due to an in-house technical prohibition preventing more than one application from running at the same time: the reason being to not have many apps running in memory and slowing down or disturbing the user experience.  Many critics pointed out that apps were clearly running simultaneous with others such as iPhone Mail, which notified users of new messages as they came in.

In addition to 'cut, copy and paste' Apple claims that iPhone OS 3.0 will have around a hundred new features.  However, we can't help but notice that support for the Adobe Flash player is not one of them....

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Starts off cute - and quickly evolves to irritating

There are some good things to say - but not many.  It appears that Spore Creatures for the Nintendo DS is simply a segment lifted out of the full PC desktop Spore game experience.    Undoubtedly the DS offering has been crippled by the machine's small screen size and poor graphics capabilities. 

While the game does have some charm in a low-fi sort of way, the initial cuteness of the characters and situations doesn't last.  Despite the game claiming that players can create and evolve creatures, this ability is rather thin and linear.  Actual game play is structured in an explore levels / kill bosses to advance model.  Sadly, Spore Creatures offers very little which is new and certainly nothing innovative. 

Save your cash - buy Spore for your desktop.