After months of speculation, Google has finally confirmed and announced its own cloud storage service, Google Drive. This could possibly be a game changer especially for competing cloud storage services that do not have as big as brand like Dropbox, SkyDrive or SugarSync.
Now the details. Google will provide free 5 gigabytes of storage for everyone who registers. There will be different plans available for those who want additional storage. A 25GB upgrade will be $2.49 a month, 100GB is priced at $4.99 a month, and 1terabyte is $49.99 a month.
Google Docs will now be integrated into Google Drive, which means real time collaboration on files (documents, spreadsheets and presentations) is now possible. Google Drive will also be integrated into Google+. This means you can send or share files like photos from Google Drive directly to your Google+ account.
Google Drive can be used on either the Mac or PC environments. There will be an app available for Android phones and tablets as well so you can access your files wherever you are. An iOS app will be made available at some future date.
A great thing about Google Drive is that you can search files by keyword or through different filters. An additional feature is Optical Character Recognition which allows you to search words from scanned documents or recognizable content from photos.
You can test Google Drive now by clicking on this link.
Originally posted on April 24, 2012 @ 9:25 pm