Google Drive is now official, the storage service “in the cloud” comes with 5 GB free and integration with Google Docs. Users can expand the storage space available to 25 GB by paying a subscription fee of $2.49 per month. For $4.99 you get 100 GB, and for $49.99 we get a virtual hard drive online, with a capacity of 1 TB. Upgrade to any of the paid versions of Google Drive brings storage expansion to 25 GB for the Gmail account. Same as Google Docs, Google Drive allows users to work in parallel with open documents, provide facilities for distributing content to other users, add and receive comments; a notification system is in place for comments to documents and files stored online.
In terms of advanced features, Google Drive gives us the option to search in the collection of files using keywords or by applying filters to the desired file type, the name of the user who has uploaded the file and more. Among other things, Google Drive offers an OCR function for text recognition of scanned documents. Google states about the GDrive service that it is adapted to work perfectly with other Google services. For example, users can attach photos saved in Google Drive to posts on Google +, and soon as attachments to email messages created with Gmail. Being an open platform, Google Drive can be integrated with third-party applications and services, facilitating activities as sending faxes, video editing or designing a website directly from the storage space provided online.
Google Drive is available for PCs with Windows and Mac, Android devices and soon for iPhone and iPad. The new storage service from Google will be a direct rival to Dropbox, Box and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. The competition for the cloud market is getting tougher as the other service providers diversify their services in an effort to attract more customers.
Reply