Amazon may have got the upper hand over Apple and Google by launching its streaming media player service, Cloud Player, first, but it's something that's been in Ubuntu One for a while.

Amazon Cloud Player was unveiled today as a way for customers to access their music libraries wherever they are.

It works by storing music in an Amazon Cloud Drive and then streaming purchased and uploaded music to a variety of players including web (for PC and Mac), Blackberry, Palm OS and Android. Apple iPhone is strangely missing from the list. Amazon Cloud Drive accounts are free for 5GB of online storage space, although MP3 downloads do not count towards the total storage.

As exciting as this sounds, it's a very similar service to that built into Ubuntu One, which is part of the Ubuntu 10.10. With the free account you get 2GB of online storage, although purchased MP3 files do not count.

Ubuntu One Mobile streaming is available to iPhone and Android users, although the service does cost $3.99 a month. However, for this you also get contact syncing, while photo syncing is coming soon.

Admittedly, Amazon's service will most likely have a bigger impact, but it's interesting to see that the service everyone's been getting excited about has already been done in Linux.