SPOTLIGHTm

Amazon.com for iPhone

What is it?

It’s an even more iPhone optimized version of shopping giant Amazon.com via an application (site was already optimized well in our opinion) that lets users not only search and check prices, but sign into their accounts, buy, and remember different products.

How much does it cost?

Free.

Who is it good for?

Anyone who shops for items that could be available on Amazon.com - which encompasses most of what many of us purchase outside of food. Any price conscious shoppers and people who will trade instant gratification for potential savings. Existing Amazon customers will derive the most benefit from being able to access their account and shopping cart through the application.

Summary

With the competitive prices generally offered on Amazon.com, this application is not only a great shopping app, but a good place to check prices before making an impulse buy. We realize that Amazon doesn’t always have the lowest prices, but they’re generally very competitive, especially when it comes to media (CDs, DVDs, games), products that people often pick up while they’re out. With the ability to buy through the application, Amazon has made shopping and price comparisons extremely easy to the millions of customes that already use their services.

Sure, there are some shortcomings - the inability to purchase MP3’s or digital videos to play on one’s iPhone or iPod touch comes to mind (understandably because it could take some of iTunes share) - but the neat “Amazon Remembers” product is a pleasant surprise that helps customers find and remember products that they’re not yet ready to pull the trigger on. Overall, this application provides a fantastic, stable mobile shopping experience from one of the biggest names in retail that can come in handy before you hit the checkout line.

Keep it or Delete it?

Keep it.

We admit, the Amazon.com application is one of our favorites and a borderline “must have” app. With the ability to shop from anywhere and a fast-moving, stable application, Amazon is literally bringing its website shopping experience into our pockets.

The Amazon site is so familiar to most of us by now and one of the challenges with the application was going to be making it feel just as comfortable as the site. Thankfully, it achieves this with ease.

After signing into your account, which instantly links you to your web shopping cart, shipping and billing information, you’re able to have a pretty robust shopping experience. The application still gives you access to reviews, product information, and even tells Amazon Prime users which items they’ll be able to get free shipping for. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a sign up option for those who somehow don’t yet have Amazon accounts, but by now, most of us do.

Since Amazon has “almost everything” at this point, you can do a quick search and comparison shop anytime that you’re out and about before you make a purchase (see: refrigerators). With reviews, the same product info you get on the site, and of course, pricing, the application turns into an Amazon-centric price comparison godsend.

One of the neat features is something called “Amazon Remembers,” which sounds like it’s experimental for now, but looks like it’s functioning pretty well already. While some say that the application is missing a barcode scanning function, we disagree - simply because getting another lens to enable the iPhone camera to scan barcodes seems like a bit of a hassle for the time being to use an application like Snappr.

Amazon Remembers allows you to snap a picture of an item that you’re thinking about buying or would like to remember without having to search for it. Amazon will look at the picture and send a link to the item or a related item that they carry on the site to both your registered account email and your iPhone application. While the gratification is not instantaneous like something like SnapTell, it’s a new way to search and have search brought to you instead of typing in a model name or if you can’t locate it for some reason.

While times will vary on responses because it’s a human-powered system, with common items, we found that we were getting responses within a few minutes, which was pretty impressive. True, you could just search for the item, but we could see how this could come in handy when you’re shopping on the go and looking for gift ideas.

Ultimately, the Amazon.com shopping application is a fantastic addition to your iPhone-tiled dashboard. The ability to not only search, but buy through the application without having to create a new account if you’re an existing customer makes for a fantastic shopping experience. If you’re a comparison shopper or just an Amazon user, you’ll find a lot to like in the cleanliness of this application.