There were rumors that today Google Drive will be launched, since the French edition of Google posted a short text on its blog regarding this event, but this information was quickly removed, making users worldwide ask what's the matter with Google?! If it was all about a teaser, then Google succeeded to draw attention, but if it was just a human error, then it's quite frustrating to be hearing this from Google.
Google Drive, In Depth
Early this morning, Gerwin Sturm, an Austrian developer and Web designer, spotted a Google Drive announcement, associated with Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice President for Google Chrome & Apps. In that post, Pichai stated that right today Google Drive would be released as a centralized space for your creation, sharing and storing documents. Pichai has mentioned something about establishing a budget with your staff, which made me think whether in the future Google Drive won't be a business paid service.
Staying in rumors' universe, it seems that Google Drive will offer 5GB of storage for free, which will be gradually increased to 16TB, in exchange for a necessary monthly fee. Since Gmail started as a free service, including email and a minimum storage capacity, I think that fee won't make you break your piggy bank in the end of the story.
As you can imagine, Google Drive will integrate Google Docs, allowing you to work with your colleagues on documents in real time, as well as sharing and commenting all types of media, mostly PDF, videos and images. Google will let you access files from anywhere, just like competitors, plus mobile apps for iOS and Android. Much more, Google Drive will always be a shortcut towards Google Play store to download apps for your Android device. According to Google's fans and important media institutions as Reuters, soon enough you will find in the very online store the magical icon and the show can start in a second. If you run Google Chrome on your laptop, you will also find very easily the path towards Google Drive, being one of the essential applications of this operating system.
Google Drive officially comes with 5GB of free storage, but if you want more storage, Google will gladly sell it to you. According to various blogs and sites, it seems that 20GB will cost $4 a month, which can be gradually increased, as follows: 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. Apparently, the extra storage only applies to Google Drive, and documents from Docs aren’t counted towards the final quota.
According to zdnet.com, any user worldwide has to test its Google account as soon as possible, in order to see the difference and prepare for the big hit. For instance, Google Docs’ available storage for your documents moved up within the last twelve hours from 1GB of storage towards 5GB, as promised. You can see, if you have this additional storage for yourself, by going to your Google Docs and check whether there is a listing for storage about half-way down the page. If you are ok with this feature, wait for the upcoming Google Drive.
Comparing with similar competitors such as Dropbox, Google Drive is meant to be a good replacement as a cloud collaborative environment. Pichai promised that you’ll be able to keep your documents securely and access them anywhere. With all this positive publicity, probably you ask yourself how the app will eventually work? According to Pichai, you can install Google Drive on your Mac, PC, or download the application Drive on your phone or Android tablet. An iOS version of the application will be available in the coming weeks. In addition, you’ll be able to search your cloud drive by keyword and filter by document type, owner or activity.
Google Drive, In Depth
But what's fabulous for me is that Google Drive will also include optical character recognition (OCR), so it will even recognize the text content of a scanned document. Much more, Pichai states that with Google Drive you’ll be able to open more than 30 types of documents directly from a Web browser – including high-definition video, Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop, which is quite remarkable.
For the moment, the Google Drive site is still not responding with a 404 error message, so I'm patiently waiting as you to see the big chance.
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