Amazon?s Price Check Might Be Perfect Smartphone Shopping App

If you’re headed to the mall this weekend, Amazon’s new iPhone app might be an ideal companion for comparison-shopping and price checking.

As a bonus — for Amazon — the company has figured out a way to advertise its own products is everyone else’s stores, using a clever application that leverages the key features of smartphones — in particular, Apple’s latest iPhones.

Price Check for iPhone initially doesn’t seem very different from Amazon’s well-established, multiplatform “shopping cart” frontend, which has always allowed users to check prices and buy products on the go. The difference is the variety and speed of inputs you can use to find items in the store, which make the app particularly well-suited for using it while you’re standing in the aisle of a store, gazing at something you’re thinking of buying.

Here are the main ways you can use the Amazon app:

Say It brings up a picture of a microphone with an “I’m listening” message. Speak a product’s name into the smartphone mic, and Amazon will try to find it. The speech recognition is a little iffy, and obviously homophones give it some trouble (my search for “Kinect” brought up “Connect Four”), but it’s generally pretty good.

Snap It opens up your iPhone’s camera, along with a textual reminder that the service “works best in good light with a book, DVD, CD, or video game” — in short, media objects with well-established cover art that Amazon can try to match in its database (and Amazon says it’s steadily increasing the size and variety of this database). “Snap It” worked extraordinarily well with every book I tried in the decidedly poor light of my office.

Scan It is particularly powerful, since it can use a product’s barcode to find a unique copy: it won’t confuse hardbacks with paperbacks, or widescreen and fullscreen copies of a DVD. But it requires an autofocusing camera to get high-quality resolution on the barcode — which means iPhone 4 or 3GS. My iPhone 3G has the “Scan It” button grayed out; if I click it, I get a short, apologetic notice that my non-autofocusing camera can’t scan a barcode, at least up to the standards of Amazon’s new app.

Finally, you can also type in a product’s name in the “Type It” box at the top. Once you’ve found an item, you can browse specs and reviews, or share the price over email, Facebook or Twitter, or narrow the stores between Amazon and its partners (the “Prime” compatible button is quite nice.)

There’s also a handy list of “Recent Price Checks,” so you can keep track of products you’ve scanned, and a shopping cart, so you can buy products from Amazon directly. You can’t access your own wish list, which skews the app towards impulse buys or holiday shopping for other people.

When the app was first announced, I was confused; why was Amazon launching yet another shopping application for iOS? There’s the old standby Amazon.com, the Windowshop App for iPad and now PriceCheck? Did customers really need a whole page (or in iOS 4, a folder) devoted just to apps for Amazon?

Now I think I understand the strategy much better. Each Amazon application capitalizes on the unique hardware and anthropology of the device. Windowshop is a browsing catalog, suited to the full-sized screen and laid-back posture of the iPad. Even the name suggests voyeurism and fantasy. Price Check is mobile, pulling in camera, voice and autofocus to make something you can whip out of your pocket to make a snap decision while the Black Friday hordes crowd in around you.

Different devices, different scenarios, different shopping experiences — but all of them funneling you to just one store, up in the cloud. Smart. Now I wonder when and if other platforms (Android, Blackberry, etc.) will get their chance to play with similar new toys.

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