The industry is just beginning to see the initial ripples from Amazon’s recent mobile applications store and cloud-enabled music offerings, but it already appears to be shaking things up.
Yesterday a major player in the cloud storage market, mSpot, lowered prices, and today Cellular South announced April availability of the HTC Merge, the first smartphone to come pre-installed with the Amazon Appstore.
The jockeying for position was inevitable after Amazon this week launched 5GB of free cloud storage, along with a complete MP3 music store and accompanying music player. mSpot was the first to bite, in what appears to be an effort to retain customers who might be tempted to migrate their music over to Amazon’s service.
mSpot, a self-proclaimed “cloud entertainment provider,” yesterday increased its free storage offering to 5GB on its cloud music service for iPhone, Android, PCs/Macs and Internet TV. The service enables users to upload their music to the mSpot cloud and then listen from both desktop browsers, Android and iPhone.
mSpot is also offering users the option to increase their storage up to 40GB at a rate of $3.99 per month.
Amazon currently offers 5GB for free, while 50GB per year with the online retailer breaks down to about $4.25 per month.
But the first reactions to Amazon’s move don’t stop with parallel services scrambling to remain competitive.
Cellular South today announced the HTC Merge, a new Android phone that will come with the Amazon app store pre-installed. Cellular South says the Merge, a 3.8-inch midrange Android (2.2) smartphone, will be available next month.