Recently I’ve become very interested in applications which make the most of the text messaging feature on my mobile phone. My wishes tend to go the direction of geo-location applications, but due to the virtually non-existant GPS support available, currently, in phones, this is not going to happen soon. However, one application that seems to have been filled is that of doing shopping/price comparisions from your phone.

The first application, provided by Google, is the ability to do a price comparision simply by sending an ISBN or UPC number to the Google SMS service. A few second later Google will send back the price of the book, dvd, or cd – found somewhere on the Internet. If nothing else, this is an excellent tool for use when shopping. Being able to, potentially, save money is always nice!

The second service is provided by Amabuddy. The premise behind their service is that you call up their special number, enter in the ISBN or UPC symbol of the product that you’re looking at, and the price of the product, along with a mini-review, will be read back to you (thanks to the wonders of VXML). A nice side-feature is that the product will instantly be added to your shopping/wish list once you’ve queried it, this way you can go back and look it up later. This is a different technique then what Google provides (being voice-based, as opposed to SMS) meaning that depending on how expensive your phone minutes are, this service could prove to be either much cheaper or more expensive.