The web was abuzz with the news of Amazon’s new Cloud Drive Service. There’s a lot of conjecture out on the blogosphere about whether or not this new service is really an innovation, legal, possibly illegal, or even useful.
While it’s too early to tell for sure, it’s clear that this new offering provides a nice benefit to folks who want to stream their own music collections seamlessly across multiple devices. Plus, the new service works on Android, so if you are a Dell Venue smartphone user or someone who uses a Dell Streak 5 or Streak 7 tablet, Amazon’s new cloud service provides a simple way for you to access your personal music collection (or other files) from the cloud.
I’ve been using it since yesterday on my Dell Venue smartphone and I see some real potential there. Lionel mentioned that the app worked well on the Dell Streak 5 tablet as well after he purchased the “Frampton Comes Alive” album to test out the service (he contributed to the recent bestsellers list below). Like a lot of folks out there, I’m still in the midst of uploading some of the songs from my personal collection, but Amazon makes the whole process pretty simple.
GigaOm blogger, Kevin C. Tofel, rightly points out that you can chew through your data plan pretty quickly if you stream music often, so be sure to keep this in mind. Also, streaming can degrade the audio quality, depending on your carrier’s wireless connection or your Wi-Fi signal. If you do a lot of listening, you can also try a streaming music service like Rdio which gives you the option to sync songs (or whole albums or playlists) to your mobile device so you can play that music in offline mode.
So Amazon’s new Cloud Drive and matching Cloud Player solution, which integrates nicely with the accompanying Android app, allows you to put your music in the cloud and play it whenever and wherever you want; whether that be on your work laptop, your personal laptop, your Android tablet on the coffee table, or your new brand new Android smartphone… you get the idea. Now, you can just upload music (or other file types) right to Amazon Cloud Player (or buy MP3s on Amazon for even faster access) and that’s it.
And like I mentioned, this isn’t JUST for music. You can also upload photos, videos and documents. I think some well-known music and photo sharing sites will be noticing Amazon’s bold moves today. Personally, I applaud Amazon’s move and am glad to see one of the first examples of a cloud-based solution that just might gain mainstream adoption.
Here’s a video from Amazon introducing their new service works.
The Android ecosystem just got a lot bigger. Amazon just put a stake down in the ground and established itself as the first personal cloud storage service that provides you with 24/7 live streaming of your music collection from the web or from your Android device.
So what do you think of this new service from Amazon? Will Android users adopt this cloud offering? Will you use it? If so, let me know what you think of it. Also, I’m curious on your take of the impact this announcement could have on the Android mobile ecosystem.
*See Amazon’s web site for the full details and legal disclaimers regarding their new cloud offerings, mentioned above.