As our world is constantly becoming more and more digitalized, many people are starting to look at ways to store data online.
Recently, Amazon released their online storage drive, Amazon Cloud Drive, and their online music player, Amazon Cloud Player. Amazon’s Cloud Drive allows you to store your music, videos, photos, documents and any other files worth storing on the Internet.
Amazon Cloud Drive is the company’s attempt at providing secure online file storage. They hope to entice users with five gigabyte (about 1000 songs) of free online storage. If more storage space is desired, Amazon offers tiered data plans, which average one dollar per GB per year.
Amazon is also offering a free year of 20 GB storage plan to customers who buy an MP3 album from Amazon.com, and are giving free cloud storage space for each MP3 purchased from Amazon.com. Once you have set up your Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon will help guide you through uploading your files. From here, you can access and download any of your online files any time and any place where you have access to the Internet.
The biggest draw to Amazon Cloud is their Cloud Player. Amazon Cloud Player will find all compatible audio files and add them to your cloud music library. Imagine Apple’s iTunes or Windows Media Player , but accessible from the Internet. With its simple interface, Cloud Player is an easy-to-use, easy-to-manage, portable music player.
Some of the drawbacks to Amazon Cloud are due to its simplicity. Probably the biggest drawback is that only music files can be streamed. It would be beneficial if Amazon had an online video player or a document editor so that files wouldn’t have to be downloaded in order to view or edit them.
Another smaller drawback is that all songs and files are uploaded to the drive as they appear on your hard drive.
This means that any changes to the songs have to be done on your computer first, and then re-uploaded.
With an easy-to-use music player, Amazon Cloud Drive does a good job of storing your files. It will be interesting to see what Amazon has in store for their Cloud Drive—like whether it will decide to add a video player or a document editor.
