Not to be forgotten in the online storage wars, Amazon has released Windows and Mac desktop apps for its own Cloud Drive service.
Amazon’s Cloud Drive app is a little less useful than desktop apps from other services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive. It doesn’t create a local folder on your computer for syncing files automatically, and doesn’t support sharing files with other users. It’s just a simple utility for ferrying specific files or folders to the cloud, with drag-and-drop functionality and the ability to pause or resume interrupted file transfers.
(MORE: How to Choose Between Cloud Storage Services like Google Drive and Dropbox)
Once you’ve installed the app, it creates an icon in your dock, to which you can drag the files you want to upload. You can also right-click on any file, select “Send to” and choose “Amazon Cloud Drive.”
Amazon Cloud Drive includes 5 GB of free storage, and additional space starts at $20 per year for 20 GB. The service is also tied into Amazon’s online music player, so you can listen to any song through a desktop web browser or Amazon’s Android app. Any song you buy through Amazon gets added to your library automatically and doesn’t count against your storage limit.
Amazon had been pretty quiet about Cloud Drive since launching the service more than a year ago, but now the online storage market’s heating up with the launch of Google Drive and Microsoft’s revamped SkyDrive. I think we’re about to see a big feature war among these services, so perhaps Amazon will brings its own apps up to speed with the competition soon.