Amazon has a new app out for the iPhone today—one that will make your holiday shopping far less of a headache and let you find the best price right at the store. Called Price Check, Amazon’s new app is for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Through an Internet connection, it searches Amazon.com and the company’s merchants. Just enter a product through one of the four easy methods—barcode, picture, voice and typing—and you get back a list of matches and their prices at various retailers. Screenshots at the bottom!
The free app is officially called ‘Price Check by Amazon’ on Apple’s iTunes store and supports iOS 3.1 and higher. Price Check is free of course. However, using the barcode scanning feature requires an iOS 4.x device with an auto-focusing camera (iPhone 3GS or higher). Looks like the iPhone 3G is being put to rest pretty quickly both by Apple and developers. Using the voice search feature requires a microphone on iOS devices without one (iPod touch 3G and lower). The photo search feature is recommended by Amazon specifically for CDs, games and books but through the other search methods, you can find pretty much everything Amazon sells.
Playing around with the app, I found it very easy to use. Check out through Amazon’s 1-Click system is support of course and the voice recognition and scanning functions work very well. Even if you have to use old-fashioned search (actually type in what you are trying to find), the process is quick. A search I did for a specific Sony TV brought back the specific TV I was searching for (based on just some general keywords), a number of close hits and the ratings of each. Tapping on a search result brings up a number of retailers with the product and their prices and shipping rates. Much more detailed information is available right through the app, including detailed descriptions and customer reviews.
This app is a must have tool this holiday season. Finally, we are freed from the shackles of devious stores and the on-the-spot pressure to buy! Well, as long as you can get a Wi-Fi or cellular signal. Amazon is upping the competition this year and the pressure against traditional retailers and it will be interesting to see how they respond when customers almost always have the best possible price at their fingertips.
Let me know if you will be using Price Check this holiday season!
