It seems Google is ready to take the lid off its cloud storage service, Google Drive, in the following days. The Next Web reports that they have received a draft release from one of Google’s partners that provides a glimpse of what the service entails. Apart from spilling the beans on the expected launch date, which would be sometime next week (Tuesday is a possibility), TNW’s report confirms that each user will get 5GB of free online storage space.
What does this mean for other online storage services such as Box, Dropbox, and even SkyDrive? The 5GB storage that Google Drive offers for free trumps the default storage that user gets from Dropbox’s 2GB (you can easily get more, we know), matches the Box’s 5GB storage, and lags behind SkyDrive’s 25GB storage. But of course, Google Drive will come with full syncing, meaning that any changes you make on a file will be automatically updated to your other linked machines. This is something that some of the competitors lack in the free version.
While it’s a given that Google Drive will work on PCs and Android devices, the service is expected to work on Mac computers and iOS devices as well, though details are still somewhat scarce at the moment. In addition to allowing you to access the cloud data via a browser, Google Drive will work as a local application on PC and Mac computers. The report also mentions the possibility of the Google Drive app coming with document editing capability, which is a sign that it will be deeply integrated with Google Docs.
With so many signs pointing to the imminent release of Google Drive (the leaked screenshot of the website and the premature availability of the OS X app come to mind), it’s safe to say that, very soon, you’ll have one more option to move your files around the cloud.
