Just wanted to share my early thoughts. Basically, the interface for getting your music uploaded is terrible, and the player on the phone is even more poorly designed. The cloud storage in general is not as useful as the automatic behavior of Dropbox.

However, I now have all of my music available to me at all times (as long as I have 3G/WiFi). Naturally, I can't play any of my Zune subscription music, but I can fit all of that on my Zune HD and put everything else in the cloud to play anywhere. I'm going to help my wife set her service up, which will let her play her full collection at work through the web player, which is actually pretty good. In the end, I'm still going to use my Zune HD for the bulk of my music listening because the player is SO superior to the awful app, but for "deep tracks," so to speak, this is a fantastic option. "You mean you've never heard ____? Well, I happen to have them on my phone with 8GB of storage, along with all the other 40GB of files I own."

The advantage it DOES have over Dropbox is that it's half the price. It's basically $1 per GB per year, which isn't too bad for this kind of service. Plus, for the moment they're running a special where if you buy an album from Amazon's MP3 store, they automatically give you a year of 20GB (instead of the free 5GB, which is also around double what Dropbox offers). Plus, in a smart move to try to push more sales from their own music store, the tracks you buy there don't count against your space.

In the end, Amazon has done an incredible job of beating everyone to the punch on this. Lala was sort of first with it (not exactly the same), but they're not around and Apple seems to be dragging their feet on doing something with it (Google's dragging their feet on their own service as well). I suspect that Apple will eventually come out with something much prettier, and Google might have something a little cheaper and integrated with Android or other Google services (plus it would probably use the extra space I already pay for, which is much cheaper than Amazon). But for now, Amazon is the first out of the gate.

One last thing: apparently Sony is already (one day later) bringing up licensing concerns because they're a bunch of morons. Apparently they don't grasp that I'm putting the exact tracks I own up there and listening to them, and nobody else can hear them. Just because they're stored in a different place doesn't mean the content has been transformed into something else. I could be using Orb to the exact same end result, but Sony doesn't seem to be going after them. Sony gets worse and worse as a company every week, it seems.

To sum up: the software is mostly terrible, but the web player is decent, the service does exactly what you want it to do, and they're the first ones to market. I'll be using this myself.


ps- Android users, you don't need to have Amazon's app store installed to download the app. It's probably already installed on your phone, and you just need to check for an update if you haven't been prompted already.