Here's what's new in this big update:
- Explore and browse products by category with Shop by Department
- Enhanced search refinements, including brand, author, price, Prime eligibility, and more
- Bug fixes and performance improvements
I'm a huge Amazon fan and we spend (as a family) several hundred pounds a month with the company. Partly it's because it's a one stop shop to almost everything, partly because of the prices and generally honest user reviews, and partly because of the free delivery and great customer service in the event of problems. And having all of this in a smartphone is really liberating. Even if I do end up spending more as a result!
Here's the new version of Amazon Mobile in action:
Signed and ready to shop! Shopping by department is a 'follow my nose' exercise but works extremely well...
... with low bandwidth images standing out at each stage to entice you in. Just like real world shopping.... err...... (right) the two stages of filtering (if required). Here, choosing a department to search in. We'll come back to the second stage in a moment....
Here I'm searching within physical books for titles by "Adam Hall", though quite a few Kindle editions made it into the listing. Maybe ebooks count as 'books' as-is, these days? (right) Amazon maintains the same 'recommendations' list as on the main web site - can you tell from the screenshot above that I'm married to a primary school teacher?(!)
At any point you can tap that enticing barcode thumbnail in the search box, to get the built-in code scanning function. Here I'm about to scan a smartphone and.... two seconds later up comes the right match (the '0 matches' presumably refers to Amazon's own inventory, not third party sellers)...
As you drill down to product level, you can apply the second new level of filtering, opting to restrict matches according to any of a dozen criteria - here choosing a price band, for example.
You can grab this for yourself, it's a free download here.