Amazon On The iPhone: Too Slow (AMZN)

Eric Krangel | December 3, 2008 11:44 AM

amazon-iphone.jpgTwo of our favorite iPhone applications are "Shazam" and "SnapTell." One records a few seconds of a song to identify it, and the other takes a picture of a book or CD cover, figures out what it is and links to Wikipedia entries and shopping options.

Now Amazon (AMZN) is getting in the iPhone-product-identification game: The new "Amazon Mobile" app lets you take pictures of products, and Amazon tasks low-wage workers (via the Mechanical Turk program) to match the image to a product.

It's a great idea, but far too slow. We used Amazon Mobile to snap a pic of a book lying around the office, and it took about 40 minutes to get a response. When we tried the same book on SnapTell, the results were instantaneous.

The inability to turn product recognition into impulse buys will put a damper on how many new sales the iPhone app can bring in.

But that shouldn't last. Whether Amazon has to develop a good instant product-recognition program in-house, or buy SnapTell's (or a similar service's) technology on the market, we don't think it will take Amazon too long to bring its iPhone application up to speed.

See Also:
Cyber Monday Traffic: Amazon Takes The Prize
Amazon Via Text Message: Neat Trick, And That's About It

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6 Comments

hehateme said:
The best app on the iphone is the new JOOST app. But still most of the iphone apps worthless. When is the "REAL" web going to be on the iphone. If the iphone supported FLASH and DIVX WEB PLAYER. It would be a killer phone. But right now. The iphone is just "LITTLE BRITAIN".
Minneapolis Web Designer (URL) said:
Mobile Internet also breaks more then IE.
Shawn said:
At www.itrackmine.com or www.1tm.mobi on the mobile device, you can search their site by title, other info, or ISBN or Barcode to find this same information, and it may well be faster than going to Amazon.
Is this really that big a deal? Seems to me like it's pretty easy to search with an item's title/keywords, and that the vast, vast majority of searches/purchases will be done that way. That seems more important to me than a neat experimental feature.
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Matthew (URL) said:
There's no need to wait for strangers at Amazon to respond to your searches. We have released a free iPhone app, Pricepad, that syncs your Shopping Wishlist, including photos, with the web. You can share your list with anyone directly from the phone by sending an email.

Pricepad is available for US, UK, Canada and can also lookup barcodes.

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