Amazon sweetens Cloud Drive with unlimited storage & iPad support

Amazon is clearly in the cloud storage race to win, and they are not messing around.  The online retailer’s Cloud Drive service has already proven fairly popular and now they are sweetening the pot with Cloud Player support on the iPad and unlimited storage for music.

Amazon’s unlimited storage for music doesn’t come free but it does come pretty cheap and blows Google Music away.  If a Cloud Drive user purchases any plan their account will qualify for unlimited storage for .mp3 and .aac files.  Yes, that says any plan which means even the $20/year for 20 GB of storage qualifies.  Amazon says this particular offering is limited time though so if you are at all interested in the service (or a current user on the free plan) you may want to jump on this before Amazon pulls the plug.

Amazon has also added a neat little bonus for all Cloud Drive users.  Any music that you purchase through Amazon’s mp3 store will automatically be stored on your Cloud Drive and it won’t count towards your storage quota.  That pretty much means everyone gets unlimited storage for Amazon purchased mp3s, even those on the free plans.

The last sweet bit of news is that you can now stream your music to your iPad using Amazon’s Cloud Player.  Previously Amazon’s Cloud Player supported Android devices, computers (via browser) and that was about it.  Now you can stream to your iPad by opening up a Safari window and navigating to Amazon’s website and accessing the Cloud Player.  It’s not a perfect solution, it would have been much nicer to see a native app, but beggars can’t be choosers.  Hopefully Amazon will work on a native iOS app for Cloud Player in the future, but for now this solution is totally serviceable.

Amazon is kind of blowing both Google Music and Apple’s not yet released iCloud service away, before they even get started.  It’ll be interesting to see if and how Google and Apple respond to Amazon’s aggressive push of their cloud service.

Do you use Amazon’s service now, are you holding out for Google or Apple, or are you just not all about storing your stuff in the Cloud?