Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon has been a cloud storage provider for awhile with their Amazon S3 storage service, but today they have announced a new service called Amazon Cloud Drive. Amazon Cloud Drive is a web drive where you can store files of all kinds including documents, videos, pictures and music. If you have an Amazon.com account you can start using 5GB of space for free today.

The unique feature of Amazon Cloud Drive is how it ties in with Amazon music sales. You can purchase digital music from the Amazon MP3 store and have it stored directly on your Cloud Drive. This is great, if you live in the United States, for those of us in Canada we are pretty much SOL since we cannot purchase music through the Amazon MP3 store. If you are in the United States though and you purchase an album from the Amazon MP3 Store, you may be eligible for a free upgrade to 20 GB of Cloud Drive space for one year. Not a bad deal if you can take advantage of it.

 

Using Cloud Drive is not much different than using most web based storage services. Select the folder you want to upload files to and click the upload files button. Select the files you want to upload and before you know it they are uploaded to the service where you can access them using any web based enabled device, including your smart phone or tablet. I had no problem accessing my cloud drive using my Android powered smart phone or my friends Samsung Galaxy Tab.

If you need more space than the 5GB free you can purchase more space you can purchase more easily. Moving up to 20GB is only $20.00 for the year. The prices are reasonable for the amount of storage, but Google storage is still cheaper. Here is a table of the current prices for more storage.

StorageCost/Year
20GB$20.00/year
50GB$50.00/year
100GB$100.00/year
200GB$200.00/year
500GB$500.00/year
1000GB$1,000.00/year

 
The Amazon Cloud Drive could be a useful service for those that use Amazon on a regular basis and the ability to stream your MP3 purchases using the Cloud Player or the Amazon Android Cloud Player is great for those located in the US, but totally useless for those of us that are not in the US. That could also be a problem for those people that travel outside of the US regularly and want access to their files. You will want to make sure you download them before you leave just in case you cannot gain access to them outside of the US.

I had no problems uploading some images and downloading them. I was also able to upload an MP3 and download it again, but I could not play it through the Cloud Player.

What do you think, will you be using the Amazon Cloud Drive to store your files and stream your music?


Posted

in

by

Comments

3 responses to “Amazon Cloud Drive”

  1. S. Morris Rose Avatar
    S. Morris Rose

    Here I sit in Vancouver BC with my Verizon Android phone. It’s playing MP3s from my Amazon Cloud Storage account with no trickery. True that to do the same with a web browser on a desktop box I found it necessary to pass HTTP traffic through a proxy server in the US. Not sure why it’s working on the phone, but it most certainly is. Perhaps the Android client is designed to forgive a foreign IP if the Amazon account is a US one.

    1. John Tucker Avatar

      Interesting. I had no luck trying it on my Android phone. I will have to give it another shot.

    2. John Tucker Avatar

      I tried it again, can’t even get the app. Simply not available in the Canada Market. Must be something to do with you having a Verizon phone.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Share This