Google Drive isn’t the holy grail of personal cloud services. But, Google Drive’s introduction has forced all the other players to up their game. Microsoft added paid storage options to SkyDrive. Dropbox doubled the free storage you got for bringing friends and families on board. And, Amazon introduced a desktop client for its Amazon Cloud Drive. Unfortunately, it’s just not that good.

First, if you don’t know the Amazon Cloud Drive, like the other personal cloud storage services, it offers you 5GBs of free storage for starters. You can also store any MP3 music files you buy from Amazon in it without those counting towards your limit.

You can also buy more Amazon Cloud Drive storage at the rate of a dollar a GB per year. All the paid plans also offer unlimited music storage. Before you upload every MP3 in your collection to the Amazon Cloud you’ll want to take a close look at the service’s terms of service. They’re disquieting.

But, until today, to use any of that on a desktop you had to go through a browser. One of the best features of the new big three of cloud storage, Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive is that they have desktop clients that make moving files around on Windows and Macs as easy as moving files around on your hard drive. So, when Amazon released its desktop client that’s what I expected to get. I was disappointed.

Amazon tries to catch up in personal cloud storage and falls further behind. More >