Google has begun to roll out its online storage service, Drive, to account holders. It provides 5GB of free storage to Google account owners and, in addition to being accessible as a virtual folder on the desktop, like Dropbox, has several features which integrate with other Google services.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of Chrome and Apps described it as ‘a central place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all of your stuff.’
In a blog post, Pichai explained that ‘Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations.’ Google Docs users can currently collaborate on documents by electing to share them with other users. It’s not clear yet how the ‘real time’ element of Docs in Google Drive will work.
Google+ users can attach photos on their Drive to Google+ posts and in the future Gmail users will be able to attach files stored in their Drive to emails. Scanned documents can be uploaded and Drive will perform OCR on them to convert them to text. And Google says it uses image recognition technology to identify pictures. Documents in Drive can be searched by keyword and filtered by filetype and owner.
Drive is free for 5GB and costs $2.49/month for 25GB, $4.99/month for 100GB, and $49.99/month for 1TB. Microsoft’s recently announced SkyDrive provides 25GB of free storage, and charges $50/ year for 100GB. Dropbox provides 2GB free and $19.99/month buys you 100GB.
Google Drive is now available for some Google account holders on Mac, PC and Android. Google says an iOS version will be available soon.
