And Amazon isn’t just a streaming service, so there’s no connectivity challenges: it’s a hybrid service and you can stream or download. Just clarifying based on your points. Sorry it took us a long time to get to your answers! :)

One problem I have with streaming services like Amazon is availability. I live in a rural area. I fly a lot and can’t stream music on a plane. Sometimes I take the 4-hour bus to the “big city” but there’s no cell reception between here and there. When I’m overseas what do I do? I have to do all that travelling without being able to listen to my music? No thanks. I have other problems as well, most of them surrounding ease of use and the quality of the listening experience.

But thank you for answering my question. This is an important subject for a lot of people. We hear about phones replacing music players, so the quality of the music player part of the phone is a big concern for most people. However, it seems people reviewing Android ignore it as much as Google has been. Too bad. I feel it’s kind of deceptive in a way. While you’re recommending Android phones and tablets, you’re not telling people they are anything but plug-and-play for music (and video I assume). I’ve read a hundred reviews of Android phones and tablets and this was my #1 question, but I never read anything to answer it. And getting the answer to it was, no offense, like pulling teeth. Regardless, I do appreciate your time and effort. Thanks!

Sounds like you prefer a native solution over a 3rd party one – again, personal preference and I have no issue with that. I can (and have been) easily syncing music on my computers with Android devices both with and without cables (doubleTwist is superb for this and we’ve reviewed it a number of times) and the experience meets my needs. Probably many others as well, given the download numbers of doubleTwist, for example. If you have to have native solutions, then you have them with iOS – and they’re excellent. If you want to do the same with Android, the native bits are still being built, but comparable, competent 3rd party solutions have existed for a while. Hope that helps offer some perspective – not asking for agreement, just understanding.

As far as you never hearing anything about the Android player for Amazon, I don’t understand that. We covered it with a hands-on already and it’s fairly impressive based on my daily usage since then: http://gigaom.com/mobile/hands-on-with-amazons-cloud-drive-cloud-player/ I can stream what I want when I want, or I can download for local storage as needed: totally flexible and is meeting my needs. I’ll look to do a comparison in the future, but iCloud isn’t quite the same product since you can’t stream music.

I tried the Amazon cloud player. I read somewhere I can use it on my iPhone but if that’s possible I can’t figure it out. Using it on my computer is a less-than gratifying experience. I’ve stored some music in my Dropbox but playing them from Dropbox requires picking one song at a time. That’s no fun at all. I never hear anything at all about the music and video player that’s available on Android phones and tablets. My guess is that there’s a reason for that, and not a good one. I find it odd really, since most people use their phones and tablets to consume mass quantities of music and video. There’s always talk about the various stores and how to buy the stuff, but I have yet to see anything about the experience of playing media beyond the quality of the picture on the screen or perhaps the quality of the headphones. After all, that’s what we do on our phones a lot – play music and videos. Perhaps sometime you could do a comparison of the Android player versus iTunes and players from the other manufacturers. I would find that very informative.