Amazon iPhone App
Amazon released an app for the iPhone a long time ago and I was meant to write about it but forgot.
The Amazon app allows users to search and buy items from their phone. It requires the 1 click payment system to be enabled. The feature I was most impressed about was the “Amazon Remembers”.
Amazon Remembers allows users to take pictures of items and submit it to Amazon to search for the item in their shop. If it doesn’t find one it finds a “similar” one. It syncs to your account so you can view it from your phone or computer connected to the Internet. I tried fooling it once or twice as well as taking really bad pictures but it got it 99% of the time (as you can see from the picture).
It uses a combination of computer magic and humans to identify the object in the picture. I did take a picture of someone’s face which came back with a book about faces and expressions. The product matching does not happen in real time and takes a few minutes. The good news is that you can close the app and come back to it later to see the results.
There are some design faults like every time you quit out of the app on the Amazon Remembers tab and re-open the app, it goes straight to camera ready to take a picture. What if I just wanted to see the matches I submitted earlier?
An improvement I’d suggest to Amazon would be to allow users to view their original picture they took. For example the image below shows I took a picture of a label. I would like to read the label again and compare it to the Amazon product because it contains the price and the item description.
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