Firefly: Amazon's big impulse-buying weapon for the Fire Phone

Imagine that: Amazon’s smartphone will also make it incredibly easy for you to buy stuff from Amazon.

The feature, dubbed Firefly, can recognize what the Fire Phone’s camera is looking at and link you to it on Amazon’s storefront. It’s basically the impulse buyer’s worst nightmare.

As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demoed online today, Firefly can recognize physical objects, audio, text, and even things like QR barcodes. It can also be instantly accessed using a button on the side of the phone.

We broke the news last week that Amazon would be integrating some killer shopping features in its smartphone last week. Today’s Firefly announcement is pretty much what we expected: a quick and easy way for Amazon to separate you from your money.

Firefly keeps tabs of everything you’ve scanned with the phone, so you’ll never forget a potential Amazon purchase. The feature can also quickly look up information. When he scanned a painting onstage, the phone quickly pulled up its Wikipedia entry.

Amazon is also opening up the Firefly SDK so third-party developers can take advantage of it. MyFitnessPal, for example, will use Firefly to quickly pull up nutritional information for food.

“We can’t wait to see how the developer community will surprise us with what they do with Firefly,” Bezos said.