Android Thoughts: Amazon Cloud Player And Cloud Drive: Keep Your Music And Everything Else In Amazon's Cloud

Well, ain't that a kick in the teeth? Look who managed to get their cloud based music service out the door first. I am very excited about this as I get all my music from Amazon already. Now I can also leave a copy in the cloud at no additional cost. The service works very well so far. I purchased an album from my phone just to see how it works. The purchase went through as normal but pretty much skipped the download phase. This option can be changed though to just download your music as you did before but why? I discovered that music you buy through the Amazon MP3 store does NOT count towards your 5GB of storage space! So I will have all my purchases saved into the cloud from now on. It's just one button press to download it to your phone like it used to. Once purchased the tracks can be played through your Android device in the Amazon MP3 app or from any computer using a web browser. It is also worth noting if you buy an album from the Amazon store before the end of this year you will get your storage space upgraded to 20GB for one year from the date of purchase. For FREE!

Other than buying music from Amazon you can upload any of your already purchased music or any music you've ripped into Cloud Player. This, of course, does count against your total storage space. I really wish I could retroactively upload all the music I've already purchased from Amazon into that "doesn't count against my storage space" location. One really neat thing though is that Amazon allows you to use your storage space to upload any type of file you want. They provide a nice web interface much like Dropbox where you can upload files from your hard drive. They call this Cloud Drive. While there are no sync features as with Dropbox the upgraded storage plans are about half the price. Something you may want to consider if you need a big chunk of cloud storage. This is pretty much a no-brainer for anyone who already uses Amazon for their music needs but is it enough to sway people away from iTunes or from what ever magical music service Google has up their sleeves?