Google Drive is here. Google Drive has been rumoured for a an extremely long time, so long in fact that it was seeming like it was never going to come, but this morning it’s here and you can access it. The Google Drive service initially offers 5GB to all users who sign up but also allows you to upgrade at a quite a decent price the options for upgrades are 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or 1TB for $49.99/month. There is also options for up to 16TB if you so desire. Google has also advised that if you start paying for one of these plans your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB, the other bonus is that it appears that Google is already expanding your Gmail storage from 7.5GB to 10GB.
Drive is now heavily integrated with Google Docs, so all your existing documents are already included in the service. To this end, Google has updated the existing Android Google Docs app to be the Google Drive app, which you can upgrade if you have it installed on your device or install it from the Google Play Store. I actually had to go to the Google Drive start page on the website before it would allow me to access the function in the Android Google Drive app, so be aware of that.
Introduction to Google Drive :
Google is offering desktop syncing applications which you can download from the Google Drive start page : drive.google.com/start. Drive appears to work very similarly to Dropbox in that it sets up a folder on your PC and then syncs from cloud to PC. Google is allowing you to attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, they also advise that you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail soon. There is no word on a file size limit for Google Drive, but I’m currently attempting to sync a 2GB file, so I’ll let you know how that goes.
Exploring Google Drive :
Google is also offering an SDK which you can read more about on the Developer Blog, Google intends to be able to allow users to perform functions like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive, so I imagine some Chrome extensions to allow these functions and more, will be coming along shortly.
This is a pretty cool offering, it certainly at first glance, undercuts Dropbox’s offerings if you take into account the effort required to get extra Dropbox space with referrals. I’m certainly going to be looking at the 100GB option, at $4.99 a month that is certainly a price I’m willing to look at. All I can say from here is ‘Your move Dropbox’.
