This question gets a bit more complicated when you
consider that Google already has a number of cloud services such as Play for
music storage, Picasa for photos, YouTube for videos and even Gmail as well.
Who hasn’t emailed himself a file before, right?
Google Drive doesn’t
seek to replace any of these existing Google services — though it does replace
one cloud service (more
on that below). Instead, Google Drive seeks
to replace the USB thumb drive stuffed
into your backpack or purse. And, if you pay up for extra storage, maybe even
the portable disk drive on
your desk too. You can store all manner of file formats, and Drive gives you
the option to convert files into
Google-friendly formats as well.
After spending a couple hours using Google Drive on an
Apple iMac, a Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, and an Asus Transformer Pad
tablet, it’s clear that those who will prefer Google Drive are
those who already prefer Google itself.
Indeed, if you’ve ever used Google Docs, you’ll
feel immediately comfortable using Google Drive. And if you’re a Google Docs power user, you’ll
probably outright love Google Drive.
The service offers an iCloud-matching 5GB of
storage for free, which should be enough for most users. If you want more
space, it will cost you — 25GB of storage will run
$2.50 monthly, 100GB is $5 monthly and 1TB will cost $50 a month. Google will
allow users to purchase as much as 16TB of storage, but isn’t yet disclosing
pricing beyond 1TB. Upgrading to any increased storage size will boost
your Gmail storage up to 25GB.
In the browser, Google Drive works
exactly the same as Google Docs. In fact, Drive is replacing Docs and soon all
Docs users will be Drive users, on mobile devices and on
the web. No need to worry about lost files: All your documents will show
up in your Google Drive once
you’ve switched over, and the process is painless.
Editing documents — even real-time editing of
shared docs with multiple people — works in Google Drive just
as it did in Google Docs. Sharing and emailing also works exactly the same as
before and, just as Docs did, Drive maintains a revision history of edited
files, allowing users to view previous versions as far back as 30 days.
Like Google Docs (and unlike Gmail and
Google.com), there are no ads to be found in Google Drive. There is, however, a lot of whitespace that
could make for ad real estate if ever Google wanted to go that route.
But the new service isn’t perfect. In the web
browser version of Google Drive, I found that audio files don’t play back
automatically, instead forcing you todownload the file to
your desktop, and open it up in another app before you can give it a listen.
In the mobile app — which is currently only
available for Android, but is promised for iOS — audio files are kicked out to
music apps such as Google’s own Play Music or Spotify. Videos play back
just fine in the browser, but in the mobile app, you’re once again kicked into
another app to view your media. Rivals such as Dropbox, SugarSync and
iCloud stream media without requiring a download or opening another app. It would be
nice to see Google do the same.
On the Galaxy Nexus, the Google Drive app
worked as well as any other app (e.g., People, Calendar, Maps) built into
Google’s latest version of Android, aka Ice Cream Sandwich. With a clean,
ICS-consistent aesthetic, it’s one of the better looking and easier to use
cloud storage apps available for Android today.
Like Dropbox, Box, SugarSync and many
other competing services, a desktop app for Windows and Mac OS X is
available for Google Drive as
well. But I see little advantage to using the desktop app over the web-based
version of Drive. In both versions, uploading a file is as simple as
clicking and dragging a file from your desktop into a folder or webpage. And in
both versions of Drive, stored documents open in a browser window, and not into
other apps.
So far, the best feature of Google Drive is its
integration with other Google products, and Google says further integration
with Google+, Gmail and Chrome is on the way. So, if you’re already using an
Android phone, and Gmail is your main inbox and Calendar is where you make your
plans, then Drive will fit into your life nicely.
But there is a flipside: If you’re not steeped
in the Google ecosystem, or you’re perfectly happy using one of the many
competing cloud services, I don’t see much reason to get behind the wheel of Google Drive just
yet. Unless, of course, you refuse to pay for cloud storage, and you want to
distribute your overflowing files across as many free services as possible.
