Canonical released Ubuntu 11.04 this week, giving the operating system a dramatically new user interface as well as some new features and performance tweaks. The company also recently launched an updated version of the Ubuntu One music app for Android.

Ubuntu One allows Ubuntu Linux users to store music online and access it from a computer or mobile device. The service is free to use for 30 days, but you’ll have to sign up for a subscription after that.

Ubuntu One Music 1.2 adds support for album art, DRM-free iTunes music, and OGG Vorbis files. There’s also support for playlists and improved load speeds for large music libraries.

Canonical has also updated the desktop user interface for Ubuntu One with a new look, more options in the control panel, and faster performance.

Ubuntu One Music is available as a free download from the Android Market.

via Android Guys
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It looks like HP may be preparing to launch new music and movie stories fro webOS devices including the upcoming HP TouchPad tablet. PreCentral received a tip suggesting that the tablet will have an HP Music Store and HP Movie Store.

The leak comes from a presentation HP sent to a PreCentral tipster. The images look like mockups for now, but the slide includes information about  the stores — and also a cloud-based storage locker that will let you keep your music online so you can listen on the go.

That sounds a lot like the cloud music storage service Amazon just launched, and much like the one Google is expected to introduced soon. But the HP TouchPad will apparently use an algorithm to detect the songs you’re most likely to play and make sure they’re cached on your tablet so you can listen even when there’s no internet connection handy.

While it sounds like the service will be for the HP TouchPad only at launch, it could eventually be released for webOS smartphones.

Amazon’s Cloud Drive service launched this week, giving any Amazon customer 5GB of free space to store music files online where they can be accessed from any Mac or Windows computer or Android phone or tablet. But a company called mSpot has been offering a similar service since last year. One of the key differences is that mSpot only gave users 2GB of free storage, but today the company has decided to respond to Amazon by increasing its free storage locker to 5GB.

Users can also pay $3.99 per month to get 40GB, which at $47.88 per year is actually still a little more expensive than Amazon’s plan which provides 20GB of disk space for $20, 50GB for $50, and up to 1TB for $1,000 per year. Amazon also stores any songs purchased from Amazon MP4 for free and gives users 20GB of disk space the first time they buy an album from the company’s digital music store.

Still, pushing the amount of free storage from 2GB to 5GB is a smart move on mSpot’s part. Existing users should also be upgraded to the 5GB plan soon. And unlike Amazon, mSpot offers apps fro the iPhone and iPad which allows you to stream music from the cloud to Apple mobile devices.

Microsoft’s Windows Live SkyDrive provides users with 25GB of free cloud storage for all sorts of files. You can access your SkyDrive data from pretty much any computer with a web browser, or from a Windows Phone device. But it turns out that all you need to access your SkyDrive on Android is a free app called Sorami.

The app lets you login to your SkyDrive account, browse files and folders already uploaded, download or view photos and other content stored in your account, and upload files from your phone.

The only quirk is that the app won’t access your Photos and Favorites directories, so you’ll need to make sure all the files you want to access are in the My Documents folder of your SkyDrive account.

Sorami is available as a free download from the Android Market and the app supports Android 1.6 and up.

via Lifehacker

SugarSync, ZumoDrive, Dropbox, and HomePipe are three apps that let you access files from your computer on your mobile phone. I mean, that’s not all they do. They actually let you synchronize files between computers, and store some of your files on the web — making it easy to access documents, music, photos, videos, or other files from virtually any computer with a web browser. But in the last day or so, we’ve seen updates from all three companies making it easier to do those things with an Android phone.

HomePipe

HomePipe launched its Android app this morning. It lets users access files on their home network on their phones using a 3G or WiFi connection.

You can run HomePipe on any Windows or Mac computer to stream your files over the internet to your phone. HomePipe offers unlimited storage — because files are actually streaming from your home network, not a cloud-based server. Unfortunately, this means that if you turn off your computer, you won’t be able to access your files remotely.

HomePipe for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market. There’s also a free app for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. You can download the PC server software from HomePipe.net.

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ZumoDrive is a service that lets you synchronize files on your PC with a cloud-based storage system. In other words, click on the music directory on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, link it to your ZumoDrive account, and you can pull up a web browser on any computer to listen to music, view photos, watch videos, or download files that have been shared.

The company has offered an iPhone app that lets you access your files on the go for a while. Today the company launched new mobile apps for Google Android and Palm WebOS.

It turns out the Android app is a bit half-baked. While I could use it to find files and listen to audio on my Nexus One, things got a little funky when I tried playing long MP3 files (like 30 to 60 minute podcasts). Each time I tried to listen to one of these, I got an error message and lost the ability to pause the playback or adjust the volume. The only way to stop the audio was to kill the app.

I’m not the only person having troubles. Several users left complaints about similar problems in the Android Market.

Fortunately, ZumoDrive for Android handled music files a little better. I was able to stream a few MP3s without any problems, and the ZumoDrive player even showed album art as the music played.

I fired up the ZumoDrive app on my iPod touch to see if it was more stable, and it really was. If you’re looking for a way to stream your video, music or photo collections from your desktop to your iPhone — with the added benefit of web access from any computer, ZumoDrive is a pretty nice solution. I just can’t really recommend it for Android users yet. I haven’t tried the WebOS version.

ZumoDrive offers up to 2GB of online storage space for free. If you want additional storage, you’ll have to pay for it.

The new apps are available from the Android Market and Palm’s App Catalog

You can check out my hands-on video with the ZumoDrive Android app after the break.

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