While Apple's massive data center waits in North Carolina and Google reportedly tests their service internally, Amazon launched what seems to be a pretty cool service, and maybe Android's first "killer app."
The deal is simple, you get 5GB free. Right now it mostly supports mp3's but in the future is expected to hold just about any form of media, as long as its DRM free. Anything bought from Amazon does not count against your storage limit. You can also gain an extra 15GB just for purchasing an album online through Amazon's mp3 store. Break it down and that's 20GB for the low price of $7.99 (depending on what album you purchase). Right now you can stream the music from your computer or Android device.
I recently did a clean install to speed up my Mini so I had to reinstall Adobe AIR and the Amazon MP3 Uploader. Took about a minute. I then browsed through my iTunes folder and picked out a couple artists to give it a try. You can even upload specific playlists once the app scans your library.
From the screen cap, you can see they estimated it to take me about two hours to upload 780MB. I've heard people getting a twelve hour estimate for 5GB. This may because of initial high demand, or just how the service is done. A scheduling feature would be nice if uploads were always this slow.
Once about a dozen songs were uploaded I fired up my Droid X to see if the songs were already playable. They were all ready to go. A warning came up recommending 3G or faster for my connection, I only had to wait a few seconds for the mp3 to buffer, then heard the sweet sounds of Bloc Party coming from my speaker. Quality was great. Didn't run into any skipping.
Overall I would say this is a great app and service from Amazon. Only drawbacks are the limited space and upload times. But any economist will tell you, "there's no such thing as free space in the cloud."
Posts
