Hello Google Drive, bye bye Dropbox?

 
After years and years of false rumors, today Google has finally announced Google Drive.

Why is this so cool, you might ask. Well, so it hap­pens that you get 5GB for free and you can get up to 100GB. Drop­box offers only 2GB for free. Is that enough to switch? Let’s see what Google has to say about the new service:

• Cre­ate and col­lab­o­rate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with oth­ers in real-time on doc­u­ments, spread­sheets and pre­sen­ta­tions. Once you choose to share con­tent with oth­ers, you can add and reply to com­ments on any­thing (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive noti­fi­ca­tions when other peo­ple com­ment on shared items.
• Store every­thing safely and access it any­where (espe­cially while on the go). All your stuff is just… there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while run­ning errands and from all of your devices.
• Search every­thing. Search by key­word and fil­ter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even rec­og­nize text in scanned doc­u­ments using Opti­cal Char­ac­ter Recog­ni­tion (OCR) tech­nol­ogy. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old news­pa­per clip­ping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual arti­cle. We also use image recog­ni­tion so that if you drag and drop pho­tos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and pho­tos of its gorges should pop up. This tech­nol­ogy is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get bet­ter over time.

I just installed Drive on Mac, my Android tablet and my Android phone and every­thing is work­ing REALLY smoothly. A PC ver­sion is already avail­able, and Google says that the iOS ver­sion will be “com­ing soon.” You can down­load the app here and here.

I have been using Drop­box for a long time and I’ve been pretty happy. But it only gets you 2GB for free, the sys­tem is con­fus­ing for most peo­ple who move the file think­ing that they are copy­ing it, the noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem (when some­one adds or removes an item) sucks and does not have OCR technology.

click here to keep reading

Oh what to do, what to do. I’m plan­ning to keep both, and ded­i­cate Drive to doc­u­ments shared by my team, and leave Drop­box for my music and per­sonal files. That means 7GB of free Cloud awe­some­ness. Engad­get put together this super handy chart.

On a related news, some friends are report­ing that their Gmail stor­age was sud­denly increased to 10GB. Unfor­tu­nately I have the same 8,271MB I’ve had for years.….I guess I’m not that spe­cial. Did you get a Gmail upgrade? How are you plan­ning to use Google Drive ? Please put your com­ments below.

UPDATE: 0521 This week Sony plans to launch a 5GB, cloud-based, photo and video shar­ing ser­vice called PlayMem­o­ries Online. The ser­vice will be avail­able only to Sony con­sumers within Japan, France, Ger­many, Canada, the U.K. and the United States.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 at 19:53. It is filed under Analysis, Breaking News, Education, Technology and tagged with analysis, android OS, apple, applications, backup, Cloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, SkyDrive, software, storage, technical comparison, tuesday tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.