Amazon iPhone app looks up prices based on photos

Amazon has released an online shopping app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The excitingly titled Amazon Mobile UK is the online store’s first mobile application for the UK and is available for free in the App Store from today.

Fortunately, the app is much more interesting than it sounds and it provides a whole host of features that go well beyond merely offering access to your Amazon account (although it does that too). You can’t access the main Amazon store directly, but you can search for products, read reviews, and add items to your shopping basket or wish list.

Apart from allowing you to spend money from anywhere with a mobile signal, the big advantage of the app is that you can compare Amazon’s prices when you’re out shopping. To that end, the app has a ‘Remembers’ feature that lets you take a photograph of something an save it in your account to look up later on Amazon. At least that’s what Amazon says it’s for…

In fact any image you save gets used as a search and Amazon will return its closest match within a minute or two. Unfortunately, it seems completely useless at recognising barcodes, but then there are lots of other apps for that. Where it excels, however, is in recognising photos of actual objects — a snap of the front of a boxed mouse was matched accurately, for example, while a photo of the Mobile Computer office moggy returned Hamlyn’s Choosing and Raising a Cat — clever stuff.

[ Amazon Mobile UK]