Amazon's iPhone App Remembers So You Don't Have to

By Charlie Sorrel

At first look, Amazon's new home-grown iPhone application, called Amazon Mobile, is almost pointless. To work, it needs an internet connection, and Amazon's own iPhone-optimized website works so well that you wonder why anyone bothered with an actual app.

Amazon Mobile lets you browse and buy from your phone, but there's a twist which might make this worthwhile. You can use the iPhone's camera to snap a picture of anything you may want to buy. This feature is called "Amazon Remembers", and that's just what it does. The photo is saved on your iPhone, but also on Amazon's servers so you can access it from any browser. Surely, though, you could do this with any camera?

Well, here comes the twist: Once your picture is on its servers, Amazon will attempt to match your picture up to a product. If it's successful, Amazon will fire you an email to let you know.

The product blurb doesn't say how this is done. It could be a fancy image recognition algorithm. Amazon could be farming the work out to humans using its own Mechanical Turk service (the most likely, we reckon) or it could be something as simple as a million monkeys with a million keyboards.

But even this could be done via the web. What the app really needs, and what would really annoy store-owners, is a bar code reader for instant price comparison shopping. Sadly, the iPhone's hopeless, fixed-focus camera means that won't be happening anytime soon. Free, US only right now.

Amazon App for iPhone and iPod Touch [Amazon]

Product page [iTunes]