What Does Google Drive Mean For iOS?

Say Hello To Google Drive

Available beginning today at http://drive.google.com, Google Drive is available for Mac, PC, and Android owners. While not available yet, iOS apps for the service are expected to arrive in the next few weeks.

At its core, Google Drive is every bit your typical Google product, in that it integrates with the company’s existing line of Web-based products, including Google Docs, Gmail, and Google+, to name three.

All Google users get 5GB of storage for free. From there, paid packages start at $2.49 a month for 25GB. For this, your Gmail inbox would also gain 25GB. Google is also offering additional packages going up to 16TB for $800 per month.

With Google Drive on the Web, users can upload, delete, view, share, and comment on documents within the drive. Editing the document, meanwhile, is limited to those specifically created using Google Docs. Still, when accessing your Google Drive via the Internet you’ll see some pretty nice features. These include full-text search of documents, optical character recognition (OCR) of text in scanned documents, and modest image capabilities thanks to Google Goggles.

Plus, when photos are uploaded, they may be shared directly with your friends on Google+. A similar capability using Gmail is expected soon.

On the desktop, Google Drive will remind many of Dropbox and Skydrive. After installing the free Google Drive application, a new folder is created. From this folder you can add, remove, and access files. Files will open using the appropriate application, assuming it resides on your computer. Google Docs, meanwhile, will open using your default Web browser.

Where Is The iOS app?

Google hasn’t released a Google Drive app for iOS. However, it is coming, most likely sooner than later. In fact, the folks at ReadWriteWeb recently received screenshots of the upcoming universal app.

Take a look at just a few of those shots:

Google Drive: A How To

The Wall Street Journal tech team recently released the following video showing Google Drive in action. Take a look:

Summary

Google Drive arrived today, offering users yet another way to store and share data across multiple platforms. While our initial tests suggest Google Drive works as expected, we’re not sure it offers anything significant to convince customers to switch from another service.