Amazon has just released an Amazon store application for the iPhone. (Press release here.) In addition to the ability to search and place orders through Amazon’s secure servers at least as well as one could with the built-in web browser, it also adds a feature called “Amazon Remembers.”
With Amazon Remembers, iPhone users will snap photos of things with their camera (sorry iPod Touch users, you’re out of luck) “to keep track of things in their daily lives”—and then Amazon’s Mechanical Turks will try to find products that look like the photos and spam—I mean, inform the customer of them. (Because, naturally, when you want to “keep track of” something, what that really means is you want to buy more things just like it.)
While it is nice that Amazon is taking advantage of the iPhone platform to make it easier for people to order products from them, it would be nice if they would prod Mobipocket into releasing a version of its reader for the iPhone. With eReader’s new deal with Lexcycle, and their new commitment to transcribing their own eReader-format e-books, Mobipocket is in danger of being squeezed out of the iPhone market entirely.
