Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe with pocketnow.com and today I've got a first-hand look of the new amazon mp3 store with cloud player that lets you sync and play your music from the amazon cloud let's go take a look perhaps trying to stem off the forthcoming google music player with cloud sync we still won't know exactly what it's going to be called but that'll suffice for now amazon has upgraded their amazon mp3 app which before just let you purchase mp3s from the amazon store well now you can play them and you can also play them through what's calling their cloud player now this app is available for upgrade or for initial download in the android market but it's also available through the Amazon App Store as well you can go out and get that for free today now you're probably familiar with the store where you can go out and buy stuff but let's go ahead and walk through a purchase will hit this and let's say I want to search for somebody that I just found yesterday on pandora haley westerner or western rah Westenra i don't know how to pronounce her name exactly but that'll do and let's come down here and say you know what i want to come over to albums instead of songs you can purchase individual tracks usually for about ninety nine cents or you can come in and purchase albums that vary anywhere from a couple bucks all the way up to 10 or 20 so let's go ahead and grab Odyssey it's going to cost us nine dollars 49 cents when we do that the button changes from the price into a Buy button go ahead and do that now it's going to ask for my password I'm going to do that off camera and we'll see what the rest of the purchase experience is like so with that I've logged in and now I've got a couple options I can either save this to my device or something new is I can save this to my amazon cloud drive and that's really what I'd like to show you the the Amazon Cloud Drive lets you have by default five gig of storage that you can basically upload your your music collection into now a lot of you are saying hey five gigs not that much I've got an SD card that's bigger than five gig and so do i but when you make a purchase and you can see I just got my purchase notification by email when you make a purchase through the the amazon mp3 store of an album that's upgraded to its kind of spotty but it looks like an additional 20 or it could be 20 gig in total so the unfortunate thing is that does know that the app that are the the music that you just purchased does count against that so it's a little bit frustrating there i'd like to see anything that you purchase through the mp3 store be you know outside of that now says i need to go to the amazon cloud player or continue shopping so let's go ahead and go to the amazon cloud player which is right back here inside the amazon mp3 app and I now looks like i have the have the album here let's go ahead and play track one it gives you a message about streaming from the cloud that it's going to adjust the it's not going to adjust the bit rate it's going to stream at the original audio quality which could be a good thing or a bad thing obviously if you're on a low speed connection like edge that might impede your playability it says also hear that you stream using 3G 4G or Wi-Fi that's kind of obvious to minimize playback interruptions or you can also download it to the device and play offline you're responsible for any data use its incurred yada yada yada okay let's not show that anymore choose ok and then we've got this nice little streaming indicator and it starts playing almost immediately and you can see here it's streaming pretty quickly I'm already halfway streamed through the song itself and only nine seconds in so we don't get in trouble from the the music labels will go ahead and pause that but very quick very easy you know I like that that feature in functionality let's go ahead and go back we can now have this nice little player down at the them if we we want to pick another song let's go ahead and choose that one I haven't heard that one before and again it starts streaming it in it takes about five seconds to start streaming before it starts playing and then over here this is Wi-Fi and it's a pretty decent Wi-Fi connection it looks like it's playing very very quickly and easily if we go to the next track we've got that same initial pause now what I want to find out here is after you've streamed this entirely is there that initial pause before it starts playing the next track so since you don't want to listen to do a whole bunch of this stuff let me do that off camera we'll get right back to it so we're approaching the end of this track it's four minutes 39 seconds long on a word about 428 right now and what I'm going to show you here is how it handles changing from one track which is streamed to the next track which hasn't streamed in yet so we're right at the end of this song and right away it starts playing that it looks like it's it's pre cashed the next song which is great that means you're not going to have any hiccups or hesitations between the end of one song in the beginning of the next so very cool up here when it's playing you also have this little drop down so you can get direct access back to that if you want to go and read your email or do something else when you pause that that goes away so overall I'm really impressed on there are some settings that you can go into you can sign out submit a claim code opt into only downloading over Wi-Fi clear some caches yada yada yada we can go into our delivery preferences which we set earlier in this case we're saving our purchases to our cloud drive now this lets us stream them from any cloud drive enabled device so your desktop player your android phone and whatever comes in the future I don't believe there's an iOS version that lets you play from your cloud drive yet but I'm sure that will be coming before terribly long and of course you've got your streaming preferences and I'm going to stream this over any connection type versus over just Wi-Fi or just 3g cellular and Wi-Fi so any connection type it's going work I also can refresh the cloud drive now this is kind of interesting I thought this would happen automatically and maybe it does but if I go out and make some purchases from my desktop computer in my laptop save it to my cloud drive there then this is automatically going to check every 10 minutes if I want to update manually I can do that so there's no real push notification it's more of a time to go out and check whenever this app is open so a little bit of room for improvement but overall for for initial an initial impression here I really really like what you can do with the new features and functionalities being able to play directly from your cloud drive right here it's very seamless they've really nailed the the purchase experience down so I'm impressed go ahead and give it a try it's amazon mp3 store now these are mp3s which means they are not drm protected which means you are free to listen to them on any device that supports mp3s which is fabulous more people should do that you know so that's a kind of a poke in the eye out to zune and a night so excuse me go out and grab it it's an update to the amazon mp3 app and it's very well worth your while it's a shot across the bow for google who is going to be releasing something similar that we're kind of calling google music they have some initial bits out there in the honeycomb devices that we've seen there also some apks for the the new google music player that's that have been floating around a little bit with people having mixed results being able to play them or not but amazon beat them to the punch and i think they nailed it they did a fabulous job we want to know what you think do you like mp3s over drm protected tunes if you were to buy stuff from the amazon mp3 store would you buy it and download it to your device or which also includes your computer or would you just save it into your cloud drive is 20 gigabytes big enough do they need to up that two more is this something where you're willing to sink your existing music up to your new Amazon Cloud Drive we want to know this let us know down in comments below if you have any experience is good bad or indifferent also let us know that of course if you like seeing these first hand looks at new apps and new features and functionality give this video a thumbs up for Pocket Nell I'm Joe Levi