Amazon Cloud Drive gains desktop app

Amazon today introduced a desktop application for Cloud Drive, its consumer data storage service to higher rival recently launched Google Drive and other cloud storage services.

The new desktop application for Windows Vista, Windows 7 , and Mac OS 10.6 or 10.7 allows people to pull and drop files as though they were transferring files to a native harddrive.

Cloud Drive, which launched last year , gives people tiered levels starting with 5 gigabytes of free storage, or enough to hang about 1,000 songs or 2,000 photos. Services are then available for $20 to $100 per year looking on disk space, maxing out at 1,000 gigabytes.

Up to 8 devices can access the service, and music files purchased and stored by Amazon don’t count toward a gigabyte limit.

Google last week launched Google Drive , an analogous service for storing and sharing files online which also offers 5GB of free capacity, that is cheaper than the favored service Dropbox. With the desktop application, Amazon’s service makes Cloud Drive a piece easier to take advantage of and higher integrated with a pc than its browser-based version.

Amazon Cloud Drive for consumers complements Amazon Web Services, its pay-by-the-drink cloud-computing and storage services for developers.