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Download: Lady Gagas Born This Way [+digital booklet] Only 99 cents!!

Aside from Amazon’s bargain basement pricing on what is expected to be a top-selling new release, the company is also using it as an opportunity to promote its new cloud-based storage service that will also be going up against Apple when it rolls out its own service in the near future. As noted on the Amazon MP3 Store and in promotional emails sent to some of its customers, purchase of the new Lady Gaga album, as with any other album, qualifies users for free upgrades to the 20 GB tier on Amazon Cloud Drive.

Amazon Cloud Drive offers 5 GB of storage space for free, with content purchased through the Amazon MP3 Store not counting toward that limit. The 20 GB tier is normally priced at $20 per year, but customers who purchase an album through the Amazon MP3 Store receive a free one-year upgrade to that level. Consequently, customers who do not have any interest in the Lady Gaga album may still opt to purchase the new release simply to receive the Amazon Cloud Drive storage upgrade for only 99 cents.

Download: Lady Gagas Born This Way [+digital booklet] Only 99 cents!!

While it isn’t quite as nice as an actual app, it provides nearly all of the functionality that you could ask for. Even the multitasking music controls work flawlessly. Sound quality is said to be “great,” and the only part of it that is a little buggy seems to be the scrubbing capability.

Uploading music is unsupported on iOS due to the feature’s reliance on Flash, although users are presumably most interested in batch uploading tracks from their primary computers. Drag-and-drop playlist rearranging also appears to be unsupported, and iOS support appears to be U.S.-only at the moment. The user interface is also not customized for the smaller screens of the iPhone and iPod touch, making navigation a bit awkward and requiring frequent panning and zooming.

The LA Times article also highlights some facts about the effect of price changes to music in the iTunes store since last year. In 2010 Apple raised the prices for most new songs in the iTunes store to $1.29, up from $0.99. However, that price increase slowed music sales growth considerably.

In 2009 when the average music track cost $0.99, digital music sales grew 8% in one year. After the raise to $1.29 per track, digital music sales only grew a meager 1% in 2010. Of course, it’s not Apple to blame for the price rise, but the music studios who insisted on a higher per-track average price.

It’s unclear who is eating the cost of Amazon’s price reduction, but an NPD Group analyst questioned whether a $0.69 price for hot songs will actually increase Amazon’s market share, or if the price will just create a platform for “opportunistic cherry pickers.”

“Samsung is responding actively to the legal action taken against us in order to protect our intellectual property and to ensure our continued innovation and growth in the mobile communications business,” the statement said.

The suit reportedly involves up to five infringements of patents but details were not provided. Earlier this week, Apple filed suit against Samsung over the Galaxy” line of Android-based smartphones and tablets.

These figures are not surprising considering Apple’s jump on the competition. Launched in early 2010, the iPad kicked off this tablet revolution and other manufacturers have struggled to catch up. According to ABI, tablets will continue to hit retail shelves in large numbers. The market research company predicts manufacturers will ship 40 to 50 million tablets worldwide in 2011.

With an increase in the number of Android tablets hitting the market and the debut of a dedicated tablet version of Android, the iPad 2 will finally have some serious competition. Though Android will make inroads into the tablet market, the iPad 2 is expected to keep the #1 spot for the next few years. Hopefully, we will get a glimpse of these industry leading sales figures later today during Apple’s earnings conference call.

Having owned an iPad since launch, I can definitely say that the device isn’t perfect, and could be made better. But is LG the company to make the so-called “iPad killer”? As you might expect, it’s relying on Google’s Android OS, as most competitors outside of HP will be. In addition, Ma says the Optimus tablet will be focusing on productivity — from document creation to video editing. We should expect “high-end features and new benefits,” though none of those have been disclosed.

Does that mean we should be expecting a stylus to be included with LG’s slate? Some kind of alternative (slide-out?) keyboard that’s superior to the touchscreen? We already can guess that it will come with some of the features the iPad lacks — support for Adobe Flash, front and rear-facing cameras, maybe a memory-card slot. But what else will LG’s “secret sauce” for tablet superiority include?

There’s no doubt that you can build a better tablet spec list than the iPad possesses, yet that doesn’t necessarily make it a more attractive buy. (Just think of all of the features the competition lumped into its portable MP3 players, only to succumb to the iPod’s dominance.) Will those high-end features and new benefits include a processor that is as responsive as the Apple tablet’s and battery life better than what’s expected from Android devices using other CPUs (roughly half that of the iPad)? LG will be using Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor for its Optimus phones, so maybe it’s basing its tablet around a Tegra core that could outdo an Atom or ARM-based CPU.

Still, it seems like Ma set the bar way too high considering LG’s fighting companies (like HP and Samsung) that have a lot more experience with the American market, which is ultimately where the Optimus has to compete if it’s as superior as promised. A little bravado can get you some headlines, but if it cannot deliver on the great expectations, then LG is setting itself up to come up short — once again — in North America