If you have an Android-powered device (Android 1.6 or newer) then using Google Goggles is no issue. But if you have an iPhone for example, you’re out of luck. All you can do is hope that the Mountain View-based search engine giant will roll out an iPhone version of Google Goggles, the application that lets you search for something by simply taking a picture of it.

Oh wait, that is precisely what happened not too long ago – Google announced it will release Google Goggles for iPhone in the near future. Earlier this month, at the Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, Project Manager Shailesh Nalawadi confirmed that Google’s mobile visual search tool, Google Goggles, will be released for the iPhone. Shailesh Nalawadi did not provide a timeline – he just said “soon”.

While you wait for the launch of Google Goggles for iPhone, perhaps you would like to know that the latest Google Goggles version, v. 1.1, comes can translate text from picture. You simply take a picture of a piece of text, the application will use image recognition to identify what the text says, then it will use Google Translate to, well, translate the text. The application can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and it can translate to a lot of other languages.

We knew this sort of functionality was coming to Google Goggles since February. Back in February Google’s CEO Erich Schmidt and scientist Hartmut Neven showcased this functionality at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the year’s biggest mobile event. By combining Google's machine translation with image recognition technologies, Google Goggles translated text from a photo.

Besides the translate text from images functionality, Google Goggles 1.1 comes with the following new bits and pieces: enhanced user interface, improved barcode recognition, a larger corpus of artwork, recognition of many more products and logos, and the ability to initiate visual searches using images in your phone’s photo gallery.