Wolfram Alpha kills its mobile site, pushes $50 iPhone app

Filed under: Utilities, iPhone, Search, Mobile

Remember all the hoopla about Wolfram Alpha's powerful-yet-extremely-expensive iPhone app? The $50 pricetag got more attention than the app's capabilities - doing everything the Wolfram Alpha website can do, and basically giving you a graphing calculator on your iPhone. It just seemed foolish to pay $50 when Wolfram Alpha already had a perfectly serviceable iPhone optimized version of its website. ... but now it doesn't.

In an effort to boost sales of the app, which has fallen out of the App Store's 100 top grossing list, Wolfram has replaced the mobile site with an ad for the iPhone app. Closing the ad gets you the non-optimized desktop version of the site, which is hardly convenient to use on the iPhone.

It seems like Wolfram is hoping die-hard users will shell out the 50 bucks to get their functionality back, but I suspect they might stop using the site altogether after that sort of mistreatment.

[via TUAW]

Wolfram Alpha kills its mobile site, pushes $50 iPhone app originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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