Amazon Cloud Drive

Jun 17, 2011 by

Cloud computing is a huge buzz topic in the current tech world at the moment.  All the talk lately has been about Apple’s upcoming iCloud — parts of which are in beta for users who recently upgraded their iTunes version.  But Apple wasn’t first to the punch with iCloud.  Amazon.com actually beat them there by a few months.  Today, we’ll look at some of the features that Amazon offers.

First of all, the Amazon Cloud Drive gives users 5 gigabytes of absolutely free storage. You can imagine this in terms of amounts of file types as follows:  about 2,000 photos, 1,000 songs, or 20 minutes of high definition video. A limit of 2 GB applies to each file upload.  What makes it extra useful is that you can upload and store documents, too.  So you can have your Word documents in the cloud, ready to access from any PC or Mac (or mobile device with an active Internet connection) at any time you like.  It’s very convenient, and entertaining…much like Direct TV Family Package for direct tv.

There is a limit to how many devices you can use with your account, however.  Otherwise, what’s stopping people from just giving out their login information to hundreds of friends and sharing files illegally?  This is the deal:  unlimited access to the files you store in the Amazon cloud is limited to eight devices.  If you buy an entire MP3 album from Amazon’s music service, Amazon will upgrade your account to 20 GB for a year, absolutely free. Amazon also offers paid plans for people who need more storage.   Paid plans top out at 1 terabyte, but additional space can be charged to accounts in increments.

This is not at all a bad deal, considering that you can access your music files from the Amazon Cloud Player without a hassle, it’s already very similar to what Apple is planning for iCloud.  Some of the features Apple’s new service will offer are, however, unrelated to music and file storage:  an email address @me.com and syncing calendars with iCal are a few of Apple’s advantages that we’ll talk more about next week.

So there’s a very brief overview of the Amazon Cloud Drive.  If any of you are currently using this service, we’d love to hear from you.  Feel free to leave us a comment.