Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a fan of Amazon, I am disappointed to say that both Amazon's overall Cloud Drive implementation and their application are poor examples of what a cloud-based storage implementation should be. If this is your first experience, do not judge the cloud based on Amazon. Look at Google, Dropbox or many of the other well thought out solutions out there. I will not try and list all of the things wrong with their service, but I will highlight the top reasons to stay away unless you are looking to simply store music and photos for your Kindle. 1. Performance is terrible. On my 35 Mbps connection, I can download a file from my Amazon drive and my Dropbox drive at the same time. Dropbox is 2-3 times faster on downloads. It is easily 10 times faster to upload to Dropbox than it is to Amazon. 2. No syncing. Shocking to say they don't have this considering EVERY ONE of their main competitors does and it is considered one of the most basic cloud features. Worse is that they did and then replaced their desktop app with a poor excuse for a web front end that runs on your system and solely functions to let you select your cloud drive folder location and open their cloud website to manage your files. Once you put something in there, don't expect it to be backed up. You want something on the cloud, you must manually upload it, file by file. 3. Cannot delete folders. How basic a feature is this? Well, Amazon does not seem to support it. Want to delete a directory? You must navigate down through all the folders, one by one, in the web app and manually delete each file. If there is a way to do it by folder, it is hidden well. 4. All management is web based. Want to move things around in Explorer like you can with everyone else? Not here. You have to use their web app to manage your files. Great for a Kindle, not so much for a PC. Honestly, other than automatically finding my music that I purchased from Amazon in my drive and getting unlimited photo storage space, I cannot think of anything redeeming about Amazon's implementation. They are asleep at the wheel in this case. Update: Amazon did refund my money and reduced me back to the Free 5GB account. While that is not a product-specific thing, it is one of the reasons I have always been a avid Amazon customer. They also let me know that you can select folders for deletion by holding the Shift key down when you click them. This is not enough for me to adjust my rating as it is still missing to many basic features but at least it clears up one of the "what were they thinking" items. It also talks to the lack of usability - there are many better ways they could have done this without leaving it to you to figure out. :)