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It's hard to believe: our world-spanning network, our Internet, which is the cornerstone of free speech and free society -- which, on a good day, is capable of causing populist revolutions -- is still crippled by banal geolocation restrictions. We are, of course, talking about Amazon's two latest offerings, both of which are only available in the United States. Last week it was the excellent Android Appstore for Android, and today it's the Amazon Cloud Player for Web and Android.

Along with Cloud Player, Amazon also launched Cloud Drive, which is basically just like any other cloud storage digital locker. It's not particularly feature rich, and there's no real reason to use it over something like SugarSync or SkyDrive -- it does work outside the US, however.

Its primary purpose, as far as we're concerned, is that it stores your your Cloud Player music in a subdirectory. You get 5GB of Cloud Drive storage for free, and then it's $1 per gigabyte per year if you need more space.

The Amazon Cloud Player itself will not, to put it bluntly, blow your mind. It works, but it's very much an early, and possibly rushed, release. Let's dive in to the Web and Android players for a closer look.

Amazon has just launched its free Amazon Cloud Player for both Android and the Web, plus an accompanying digital locker service, Amazon Cloud Drive. Amazon has beaten both Apple and Google to the punch with a digital locker music streaming service for Amazon.com customers, and it can be yours for free, right now.

The Amazon Cloud Player allows you to stream music stored on your free Amazon Cloud Drive in either MP3 or AAC formats directly in your browser or through the use of the free Amazon MP3 Android app. The Cloud Drive will let you upload and store almost any type of content file you like, with 5GB of free storage available to everyone with an Amazon account. If you buy an MP3 album from Amazon, it'll bump your Cloud Drive storage to 20GB for one year for free, while any MP3s you buy from Amazon are automatically added to your Cloud Drive and won't count against your storage quota. If 20GB isn't enough space for you, or you don't want to buy your music from Amazon, then additional price plans ranging from 20GB to 1000GB are available for $1 per gigabyte per year for US-customers.

Use of the Cloud Player requires a valid US-based billing address at the moment, which is likely tied to licensing agreements with record labels, but anyone with an Amazon account can use the Cloud Drive to store files. It's also not available for iOS, not even in Mobile Safari, but according to TechCrunch it has nothing to do with the lack of Flash.

Head on over to Amazon's Cloud Drive and Player getting started page, to get yourself 5GB of free cloud storage, and if you're in the US, free music streaming.

When Amazon Appstore for Android launched last week, one of its primary features -- Test Drive -- was disabled just a few minutes after it opened. With no try-before-you-buy, no refund process, and 1-Click purchasing ready to strike at any moment, this caused some problems. Anyway, don't despair: Test Drive is now enabled.

Before you get your hopes up, Test Drive doesn't work with every app. The IMDb app works fine -- you can even watch movie trailers on it! -- but the Angry Birds games are sadly not enabled. Some games work surprisingly well, though, like Bubble Buster. There's very little latency, and the framerate is really rather good. The Test Drive experience is so true to life that you even get ads; how cool is that?

First and foremost, Amazon is promising to give away one paid app for free every day. Today it's Angry Birds Rio, and it only retails for 99 cents, but that doesn't really matter: people love free stuff. People will download stuff simply because it's free, even if they don't want it! The best bit (or worst bit) is that developers still get 20% of the usual retail price, which will be paid out of Amazon's pockets.

The next defining feature is Amazon Appstore exclusives. Angry Birds Rio, CoD:MW:Force Recon and other apps will be available only from Amazon. As we know from the console wars, exclusive titles aren't always a good thing, but who cares? Amazon simply wants unique selling points, and exclusive titles are definitely that.

It's not all good, though. We ran in to some rather serious bugs while playing around with the Amazon Appstore for Android app, and then there's the matter of having to enable installation from Unknown Sources before it will even install...

The Amazon Appstore for Android, Amazon's Android Market place competitor, is now live for Android owners living in the US. Accessible in both the browser via Amazon.com/appstore, or on-device via a downloadable app, the Amazon Appstore hopes to bring a better store experience to the Android platform, and beat the Android Market at its own game.

The initial launch brings with it 3,800 apps available for download, from big name developers including Gameloft, Handmark and Glu Mobile. While 3,800 apps isn't a scratch on the 200,000 odd that the Android Market offers, Amazon's going hard with 'exclusives' with the Appstore launch coinciding with the release of Angry Birds Rio. In fact, Amazon's currently offering it for free, instead of 99 cents, as part of it's daily free app promotion, which itself will see one paid app available for free for 24-hours each day.

Amazon's also pushing a trial-like feature called 'Test Drive,' which lets you try out an app before you buy it. The system works using a desktop-based in-browser simulation powered by Amazon's cloud services, which lets you test apps for 30 minutes before you buy them. Amazon's usual one-click purchasing will also be in effect, along with a recommendation system based on previous purchases.

With all the streaming, on-demand video sites available to choose from nowadays, a site like freshly-launched Moki.tv can be a very handy resource to file in your bookmarks.

Moki bills itself as the ultimate guide to online entertainment, and it's certainly one of the best of its breed. A number of popular video services are supported, including iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Comcast's Xfinity.tv.

To customize your options, just create a Moki account (it's just three blanks to fill in) and add your services. Then it's simply a matter of browsing or searching through Moki's massive database of TV shows and movies. Everything is heavily tagged, so you can click through to view titles by actor, director, or genre.

Ratings are displayed as well, and Moki provides both an aggregate score and individual marks from Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and Metacritic. Moki also offers recommendations and an Explore page which offers curated lists featuring everything from Bond films to Roger Ebert's list of great movies.

If you lean heavily on online video services for entertainment, Moki.tv is definitely worth checking out.

A cunning fellow over on Androidnews.de decided to add /apps to amazon.com and was rewarded with a list of 48 Android apps and their pricing! You need to be logged out for the Android apps to emerge, otherwise your personalized recommendations will appear instead.

You can't click through to any product listings, but that's not really the interesting bit: the prices are visible, and they're different from the Android Market. In many cases the Android App Store seems to be cheaper, and there are even some exclusive Amazon-only Android apps, such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Force Recon. You can check Androidnews.de for a complete list of the price and exclusivity comparisons, or jump straight to the Google Spreadsheet. In case Amazon takes the page down, Androidnews.de also has screenshots of all the apps.

There is a possibility that we're seeing temporary placeholder data, but considering the Appstore-exclusive Angry Birds Rio is slated to be released in the next couple of weeks, and thus the Amazon Appstore must be nearing completion, the data is probably accurate.

If you're an Angry Birds fan and own and Android device, here's some news you'll want to file away for safe keeping. The upcoming sequel Angry Birds Rio won't be available from the Android Market. Rather, you'll have to download it from the Amazon Appstore.

That's a pretty major win for Amazon, considering how successful the Angry Birds franchise has been. If you're looking for a sure-fire way to attract customers to your new store, there's probably no better way to do it that with Rovio's follow-up effort.

As Mobiputing points out, Rovio's animated teaser for Rio announced a launch date of April 15th. If that still holds true, it's a pretty good bet that the Amazon Appstore for Android will be open then, too.

The official IMDb app for Android just got a big update, and it does not disappoint. Along with a complete design-overhaul, the app has been stuffed full of IMDb goodness to the point that it's now more enjoyable to use than the actual website itself.

The redesign is very sleek. They've basically taken the original palette and layout, expanded it all, and turned up the sexy. As nice as it looks though, the biggest thing I noticed was that everything about the app is blazingly fast. It's so fast that it's a bit off-putting, because using IMDb.com has always felt to me like an exercise in extreme patience.

Movie trailers now take center stage, literally, which makes sense since they're one of the big reasons that people like going to IMDb in the first place. The fully revamped app makes trailers, and other media, a priority now with the very first screen you see a springboard for viewing trailers of upcoming and top new movies. The trailers themselves play better than I had anticipated, and like the rest of the app, they load quickly.

Between the design and the new features, including international movie showtimes, the app is extremely functional. I was able to sprint through several movies, TV shows, actors, and news stories in seconds -- which is far more than I can say for trying to load the website in a mobile browser.

Amazon's Kindle eBook app for iOS devices just got an update to version 2.6, which adds some minor (but useful!) features. You can now view the actual page numbers of thousands of Kindle books -- which correspond to the physical editions -- making it easier to cite passages or jump from screen to paper without losing your place.

And speaking of finding your place in a book, Kindle for iOS 2.6 has added two new ways to see how far along you are. Progress meters now appear below each book listing in your Kindle library, so you can see at glance how much you've read. The iPhone version of the app also adds a "percentage complete" indicator that you can view while reading.

Finally, you can also make Google and Wikipedia searches from within Kindle. No more interrupting your reading so you can jump to Safari to look up a word or a bit of background!

Besides the previously-unseen webOS 3.0 and introducing new hardware in the form of a tablet and two smartphones, HP had some other gems under its sleeves at today's Think Beyond event. Taking center stage at the event was HP's new TouchPad, its first webOS tablet.

There was more on display than hardware of course. We now know the TouchPad will get an official Amazon Kindle application, that, like all other Kindle apps, will deliver the books you've purchased from Amazon via its Whispernet sync system. All the features you'd expect are there, including rendering text and color images, and a neat page turning animation. The Kindle app will naturally be free and will allow Amazon to stay true to its "buy once, read everywhere" stance.

Also coming to the TouchPad is an official Skype application that support video calls -- and presumably voice calls and instant messaging as well. The Skype app may come preinstalled on the TouchPad.

Last, but not least, HP has unveiled a partnership with Time Inc. that will bring magazine subscriptions to the first webOS-powered tablet. The first magazines that you'll be able to subscribe to on the TouchPad are Sports Illustrated, Time, and People. Fortune and other Time Inc. titles will follow later on. There's no info on pricing yet, but subscribing to the print magazine will get you full access to the tablet version. HP promises they'll deliver an "immersive reading experience," and we'll see in a few months whether they've done so or not.