Amazon Mobile Review: Buy from Anywhere
-Fast identification
-Purchase things anywhere
-May cause you to spend money
Amazon.com has long been hailed as the cream of the crop when it comes to online shopping. With the recent launch of their iPhone app, Amazon Mobile, it looks as though they are attempting to take a shot at brick and mortar stores of all types.
This app, like many others in the App Store today, allows you to search for any product and even purchase it from Amazon.com right from your iPhone. The feature that makes this application a complete killer though is known as “Amazon Remembers”. You simply select “Remembers” from the bottom of the screen and snap a photo of any item you would like Amazon to remember for you. This photo then gets uploaded to Amazon, where the real magic happens. They take advantage of their service known as “mechanical turk”, which is literally a human powered search service, in this case. With this service a real human looks at your photograph and identifies exactly what you took the photograph of with surprising accuracy. Amazon stipulates that this process can take anywhere from 1 minute to 24 hours, but personally I only ever had to wait 5 minutes, at the longest.
I put the Amazon application up against another app, SnapTell Explorer, which uses a more algorithmic approach to identifying the target object. For this face-off, I snapped a photo of the front of my Nikon D80 camera (with the D80 and Nikon clearly visible), the spine of the OS X Leopard box, and the front cover of I am Legend. The I am Legend cover was easily identified by both applications but the D80 and the OS X box were only identified by Amazon. SnapTell Explorer turned around nearly instantaneously with a response, whereas Amazon took a minute or two.
After returning the identified object, the Amazon Mobile app allows you to compare prices, look at reviews, and even purchase the item from your phone. It even saves this information to your account so that when you log in to Amazon on your Mac it will be displayed on your homepage for further review or purchase.
Currently the Amazon Mobile app is listed for free on the App Store.
The Snaptell application uses specialized image-recognition technology that instantaneously links information and an image with the snap of the iphone’s camera. The Snaptell app didn’t identify the Nikon camera, because it only works for books, CD’s, DVD’s, and video games.
There really isn’t much of a competition between Snaptell and Amazon Remembers. Snaptell makes use of ground breaking technology, whereas Amazon’s app relies on its “Mechanical Turk” service which relies on people to identify images at roughly $0.10 per response.