We seen and heard speculations, false starts and still more speculations from the experts but it really took a bit of time for the big G to make up its mind and even though some of us did start cribbing a bit about it is time to put those worries and speculations to sleep because Google Drive is finally here. Let’s find out what Google Drive is all about and how it stacks up against its competitors.
Okay, basics first - Google Drive is basically a storage and syncing service from Google and didn’t actually have to wait for this baby for at least six years. Since it offers both storage and syncing, it’s definitely a preference as over a couple of its competitors that have for so long tried to woo users into believing that syncing is all you need - stores is an absolute waste of time and completely unnecessary! Yes, there are service providers that do not offer any kind of storage at all and still they charge a bomb, but, we are not going to get into all that, let’s focus on Google Drive. Google Drive offers 5 GB of online storage and has software inbuilt in it that allows synchronization of files between Windows and Mac platforms, all sorts of android devices and Google’s cloud. 5 GB on storage? What’s the big deal? Well, that along with the syncing capabilities of Google Drive comes for free! How’s that for starters? If you need more storage space, you could pay an additional $2.49 a month and Google is going to offer you 25 GB of extra storage space that could go up to 16 TB. Apple on the other hand has announced that it is going to launch an iPhone application that would enhance the syncing capabilities of Google Drive across iPhone platforms. That’s good news for Apple aficionados.
There are a whole lot of cloud computing service providers out there, but if you dig deep you would see that most services are not worthy of the price they charge and that basically brings down the competition to a handful of service providers and amongst those service providers, Dropbox has been a major player for some time now. It seems that the research team at Google have carefully crafted plan to step on the toes of Dropbox and we might say that to some extent Google has been successful. The farmer only offers 50 GB of storage space for around $10 per month, whereas Google Drive easily offers hundred gigabytes of storage space for half that price. We understand its cutthroat competition out there but we never expected that big G to sell products on price advantage! But, of course we are happy about that. The former also offers free storage space but it’s definitely not as big as that offered by Google and if you are lucky enough you might be able to get your hands on a couple of coupons that might even get you a better deal, but at the end of the day the price offered by Google is definitely going to make you think twice about going with Dropbox.
Image Source: Flickr - Tilak Bisht
