It is not Apple or as a matter of fact Google who actually introduces the so called and much hyped Cloud technology and deliver it to the masses. Amazon became the first company to launch Cloud Drive & Cloud Player for the consumers. I’ve tested this myself (from my Amazon account) and so far it looks good. Am I going to use it? Not yet, as I am very happy with my 8gb portable flash drive which I put in my pocket and go anywhere. So for me cloud is still up there and far to reach. May be in future I might give it a try.
So what exactly Amazon’s cloud drive do? Well it is just a kind of hard drive in the cloud (cloud is the new name for the internet). You can upload your pics, videos & documents into that drive and can access it from any where. The good part is this stuff which you upload can be accessed not only by your PC or MAC but by your Android phone as well. Amazon cloud player on the other hand is a browser based application and it is capable of playing music from the Amazon cloud drive. Currenlty apart from PC & MAC, cloud player is supported for Android platform and comes as an integrated part of Amazon’s MP3 app for Android. There has been some sort of protest by primary music companies (Sony Entertainment) against this locker service of Amazon, but as per the latest news, Amazon execs will seek the license from several media & entertainment companies sometime this week and hopefully this will settle the dust.
Here are the current plans which Amazon will charge for the cloud drive. 5gb of space for Amazon account holders with valid US address is free. Amazon will charge 20gb for $20 per year, 50gb for $50 year and so on. To uderstand the pricing and cost associated with the cloud drive, please see this link for more details.
With the slashing prices of flash drives and portable storage device this deal sounds a bit expensive, but if you are someone who is always connected to the cloud via your laptop or Android phone then you must give it a try. All in all Amazon did a good job in inititating the cloud competition and bringing it to the consumer level. Hope Apple will soon launch its iTunes in the cloud and from the reports it seems Google is working on its in house application for sharing music in the cloud.
Amazon has taken the very first step to send our digital belongings in the cloud, will that make the flash drive and other solid state devices obsolute, will cloud become our new PC or MAC? The answers are on the way. Still a long road for all of us to start living among the clouds, but the tech giants are trying very hard way too hard.
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