Amazon continued to expand their cloud ecosystem by releasing Cloud Drive for Android. The cloud and local storage based system will allow users to access their phone pictures and upload them to Amazon's cloud services. This is undoubtedly a move to expand their own Fire OS framework, but the rest of us get to benefit as well from their creations. Here are the features for Cloud Drive:

• Store and secure thousands of photos with 5 GB of free storage
  
• Upload individual photos or entire albums from your phone or tablet with one simple touch
  
• View your photo albums in stunning layouts from your mobile device or on your computer
  
• Share your Cloud Drive photos on Facebook, through e-mail, and many other apps

I don't know about "stunning", but this is a very practical application and useful for those who use other Amazon services such as MP3, Kindle, Appstore, and other cloud services. The look and feel is consistent with their other applications. There is a simple black background with their classic white and orange text.

The benefit of using Cloud Drive Photos will be within its simplicity. I was able to upload individual photos simply, but had to guess by long pressing an album that I could upload albums to Cloud Drive from my phone. While it is simple to upload files from my desktop into Cloud Drive, I had to install a desktop application to do that. While this probably works seamlessly within Fire OS, I could not install this application on my Nexus 7 through the Play Store. This application would look great on my tablet and hopefully Amazon will expand this beyond their own tablets into the Play Store. I was able to download the application to my Nexus 7 from the Amazon Appstore, for those that want to check it out there.

So on it's own merit, the application works great and it provides a single location in the cloud to access up to 5gb of photos for free. I always say redudancy is a good thing with our photographs and Amazon gives us another easy solution. The application itself can use some advanced features, but knowing their market with Fire OS, Amazon is going to want to keep this application as scaled back and simple as possible. I don't see any changes in the horizon with the app, and I think that is just fine.