Google Drive Arrives - First Details
The anticipation for Google fans has ended - Drive, slated by some as a possible Dropbox-killer, has made it's official debut, according to Google's own blog.
I reported earlier this morning that Google had begun silently increasing the storage space of Google Docs, from just over 1 GB free space to a whopping 5 GB, without fanfare or press release. This was believed to be in anticipation for the coding swap that would provide users with Drive - a file storage and sharing suite for anyone who has a Google account.
Not long after our story came out, Google officially released Drive, with details on their blog, including:
Integration with Google Docs, allowing users to continue creating, collaborating on, and sharing documents, spreadsheets, forms and drawings - just with five times more space.
Integration with other Google apps, like Google+, will allow you to take a photo and store it in Drive, then share it to Plus. GMail will be able to navigate the contents of Drive as well, for attachments to friends.
An desktop and mobile device syncing application, similar to Dropbox's, allowing you to define a folder and sync across devices and the cloud by dragging and dropping files into the app. Sorry, Apple fans, but the blog states they're working on an iOS application - Android users, after all, have to take front of the line privileges...
You'll be able to search the contents of PDFs, images and other scanned documents using Drive's built-in optical character recognition system (OCR). Evernote users have had this functionality for awhile now, and now the rest of us will enjoy the ability to store a PDF and search for a word in it through Drive.
Follow Technorati