A while ago we heard Google were going to be bringing streaming music to Android mobile phones and Android tablets, unfortunately we’re still waiting.

Fortunately, it looks like Amazon who rocked the Android boat by releasing the Amazon Android Appstore and offering a free download of Angry Birds Rio (in as many weeks) are on a roll by launching the Amazon Cloud Player for the (US) Android loving public.

The Amazon Cloud Player allows owners of Android-based mobile phones and Android tablets to gain access to the Amazon MP3 store. You can also pay a yearly fee for cloud-based storage which allows users to store their music, easily access them and download them till thier hearts content.

But, that’s not all. Cloud Player users will also be able to stream their music from the cloud, right to their device whenever they want. Services start at 5GB for free, or all the way up to 1,000GB for $1,000 year.

Amazon are also offering a deal that gives you 20GB of storage for a year for free if you buy an album through their MP3 store. It’s a good deal for anyone who is looking for more storage and wants to buy a new album.

Amazon Cloud Player is a US only service at the moment. US of A, feel the rest of the world’s pain.

Amazon.com have ’100′s’ of Google Android apps for you to use and abuse before you hand over your hard earned Queen’s heads, or in this case hard earned Benjamins.

You can ‘Test Drive’ available apps within your browser using your mouse to experience it just like you would on your phone. All you have to do is click on an app, then click Test Drive Now, simples.

Amazon is making huge strides for Android users. We now have a market where apps can be rejected, we have the best of both worlds. A completely open Google Android Market and the more stringent Amazon App Store. Either way, Android is still open source… Google planned to let people do whatever they wanted with Android.

At first I was a bit skeptical of this new Amazon App Store. I didn’t think it would be good for the whole Android ecosystem but now I think this will probably only help as competition makes better products.

Test Drive is currently not available to customers outside the U.S.

Apple released the iPad 2 tablet this month…

It seems like Apple rushed to bring the iPad 2 tablet meaning that they did not have enough chance to test the mobile tablet.

Apple iPad 2 tablet owners are reporting the same problem with Apple’s first tablet incarnation, the iPad (one?) tablet.  Back in 2010 Apple acknowledged there was a problem with the tablet. Then, Apple fixed the problem with by applying a software fix for the mobile tablet.

The first company to use the full potential of Apple’s latest tablet, the iPad 2 tablet is Firemint, who released a demo video for Real Racing 2 HD today.

The Apple iPad 2 tablet has full support for high-definition 1080p output.

The Youtube video shows the game playing in 1080p FULL HD which is a first on Apple tablets or mobile phones.

At full screen 1080p, the graphics look gorgeous and chrisp and seems to run at rock-solid frame rates.

After playing around with it for an hour or two I actually grew to like the Wildfire – it was sleek, well finished, felt great to hold and it seemed to respond faster than my HTC Hero, needless to say I ended keeping my Wildfire for a number of valid reasons;

“5 MegaPixel camera with LED flash and autofocus”
I’m not a photographer or an expert but I’ve taken a few photos with the HTC Wildfire’s snapper and its pretty good at taking pictures. The software is easy to use and its quite fast as well.

“Android 2.1 with HTC Sense”
The combination of Google’s brilliant operating system and HTC’s excellent skinning software has catapulted handsets like the Wildfire, the Hero, the Legend and the Desire into the iPhone league and arguably way beyond the Apple offering. Slick looking HTC widgets and apps such as a choice of twelve beautifully crafted live clocks to put on the home screen as you see fit, info sharing widgets such as the stocks, news, animated weather, web bookmarks, email, SMS messaging, twitter and facebook offerings to mention just a few.

“Android Market app store”
Universally slammed for not having as many apps as the iPhone offering it’s still the fastest growing app store outside Apple – here’s a few essential apps that I can’t do without;

3 cubed music player – (available free from the market) taking the “cover flow” concept to a whole new level – listen to and navigate your music collection via a rotating 3D album art cube. Also has the ability to find missing album art via the web and check the concert schedule of the artistes in your music folder.

Amazon Kindle app – (available free) The famous e-book reader is now available on Android and it works brilliantly.

Amazon MP3 – (available free) Works exactly like the iTunes music store on the iPhone, I’ve bought many an album this way.

DoubleTwist – (available free for Mac, PC and Android) Basically does what iTunes does for the iPhone, provides seamless media synching options between your phone and computer.

Spotify – (free to download, need subscription to work) The ever popular music database, access thousands of tracks for a flat subscription rate LEGALLY! You can even download music for off line listening.

Google search by voice – (free to download) Does exactly what it says on the tin, with the added bonus of working quite well. You can even ask for directions to landmarks or maps and will even bring up contacts in you phone book.

Google Maps with street view and navigation – (free to download) Simply awesome, enough said!

I could go on but I wouldn’t even scratch the surface of what this phone could do, so in brief;

Things I love about the HTC Wildfire:

- Great styling and build quality

- Responsive and smooth operation

- Good camera

- FM Radio

- Android 2.1 with HTC Sense (strong operating system enhanced by HTC’s brilliant skinning efforts)

- Really good call handling abilities

- Excellent multi-touch browser with flash support

- Awesome Google app integration (Calendar, Contacts, Gmail). Seamless Google “cloud” interaction has made synching to my laptop a thing of the past.

- Android Market, some very useful apps on this platform

Things that may cause problems with the HTC Wildfire (although not for me)

- Old school low resolution display

- Touch sensitive controls at the bottom of the screen may take a while to get used to

- Some Android apps are not optimised for the small screen size of the Wildfire and therefore won’t show up in the Android market.

Overall, the HTC Wildfire feels like a premium handset and offers unbeatable value for money – I’m a happy customer!