Amazon: UK Music Downloads and US iPhone App

December 3rd, 2008 by Connor Byrne | Filed under News, iPhone.

A couple of random Amazon stories for you here. Firstly, it looks like their MP3 Music Download service has been silently launched in the UK today. Tracks start at 59p each, with albums going from £3. And there’s a special app available to handle the downloading and iTunes insertion on the desktop. I’m about to give it a try so I’ll let you know how I get on. Hit the link below and we might get a small kick-back from your purchases — we haven’t been able to confirm or deny whether downloads are included in the Affiliate scheme.

Next we have the Amazon Mobile iPhone app. You’ll remember last week we mentioned Mazo, a similar app which was nixed by Amazon. Well I guess we now know why. Amazon Mobile is currently US only — it connects to Amazon.com and the App Store link below won’t open in the UK — and seems to do some of the things Mazo promised, while having a few extra tricks up its sleeve. For a while now, people have been requesting the ability to capture a barcode using the iPhone’s camera and have an app find the product on-line. Amazon Mobile doesn’t quite do this — the main sticking point appears to be the lack of a macro function on the iPhone — but it comes pretty close. Take a snapshot of an object and it will upload it to Amazon, where it will be examined and if a match is found in their catalogue, you’ll be e-mailed a link to it. Yep, it looks like this is powered by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk Third World infinite monkey brain farm. Low tech, but still kinda clever. If it works. We’ll be keeping our eyes and ears open for funny/horror stories.