Amazon is throwing its hat all the way in the ring of the battle for cloud storage supremacy with the introduction of desktop syncing for its Amazon Cloud Drive service. This puts it at a competitive level with other popular services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive. Prior to this update, the service was only available using the Web interface, which limited its use compared to the competition.
The new desktop application is now available for Windows and OS X, leaving Linux out in the cold on this one, at least for now. Amazon’s Cloud Drive desktop app is free to download, but you’re going to have to install Java in order to run the application. The Windows version comes bundled with Java, and Mac users will receive a prompt to install Java if they have not already done so.
Just like Dropbox, the app creates a new folder on your drive to which you can copy the files you would like stored in the cloud. Once there, you will have access to those files through any computer on which the app is installed, or through Amazon’s Web interface.
Sadly, Amazon has not launched mobile versions of the app (other than the Android photo syncing app), and focuses most of the functionality on its desktop app. This certainly limits the use of Amazon’s service, since many users will be looking to take their files with them on the road, and means that Amazon is still playing catch-up with Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive, all of which offer mobile applications for various operating systems.
Amazon is offering 5GB of storage for free, and the price for adding more data is reasonable when compared to the competition, which could make Amazon’s new Cloud Drive app a worthy alternative to the existing options.
Will you try Amazon’s new app? Does it bring something new to the cloud storage game?
Source: Web Monkey
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