Amazon Attacks BlackBerry Owners’ Credit Cards With New Mobile App
by Peter Kafka
Posted on April 9, 2009 at 7:47 AM PT
Good news for Amazon, bad news for me: The online retail giant has created a version of its popular iPhone app for lowly Blackberry customers like myself.
The free program that Amazon (AMZN) created for Apple’s (AAPL) phone is a powerful tool, and from what I can tell, it works equally well on Research in Motion’s (RIMM) devices.
My BlackBerry 8830 doesn’t have a camera (maddeningly), so I can’t test out the photo-match feature, where users submit a picture of something to Amazon and the retailer tries to find something similar in its catalog.
But I can testify that it’s dismayingly easy to buy something using the app, which is why I’m on the hook for an Aretha Franklin CD headed my way right now.
Aside: Play with the Amazon app for more than a couple of minutes, and you can start to get an idea of how mobile advertising, currently in the “should be big one day” phase, could actually be big. Combine digitally delivered coupons–for stuff I actually want–with powerful e-commerce apps like these, and there might actually be a market for mobile ads.
