Gadgetory

well hey this is dante with the verge we're taking a look at google drive which was just released today the new cloud storage platform it has 5 gigabytes of free space for everybody and you could pay more and get up to 16 terabytes if we look at the web app here you'll notice at first that it's very similar to Google Docs and this really does replace google docs if you go to docs google com it doesn't exist anymore as long as you upgrade the drive you're just going to have drive what we see here is you know all of our files now you can upload everything not just work documents and if you choose to open up something it's going to open up in a new tab and if we go back to drive you could see in the interface here we can upload files or folders from our desktop anything we want and when you do it's pretty quick and you get this little notification down here sharing features in Google Drive are pretty much identical to Google Docs if we go in here we can right click a file and tell it to share and you'll if you ever use Google Docs you'll recognize this screen additionally a drive is very search focused you can search all your files and Google's saying that if you search for images it can use its image recognition technology and bring up files like if you have a picture the eiffel tower tower you can search for eiffel tower and you will get that the pop up and there's also OCR for PDF so if i search here for snowflake it'll pop up this result in this PDF which are found which is pretty great in addition to the web app there's also a Native Client for the pc and mac and it's very similar to dropbox you've ever used that and if you open it up you you get this folder view and finder that's pretty much identical to dropbox and the one really disappointing thing for us is that google docs files have to open up in the web browser there's no way to open it in pages or text edit you know if i go here and go to open with this is really just a web shortcut so if i open up this file you'll see it kicks me out to chrome and you know so there's no way to try to it just sort of a strange disconnect between desktop and web one of the other complaints we have with this native app is that you can't switch accounts at all you know on the web app it's pretty easy to switch in the top right corner but from here you'd have to sign out and completely delete your Google Drive folder or make a new one if you want to switch accounts which can be problematic if you have like a work one and one for personal use there aren't too many options in the native app but if we go up here we can see that we get around selective sync for folders just like for the web app Google Docs has been completely replaced by Google Drive you'll see that at the top way of account switching and a very simple interface that will look familiar to anyone who's used docs if we go into the top here we just have a list of all the files and if we go to the right we can share make files available offline and there's also a search so we can look through images like before and OCR and PDF documents and lastly there's an option here to upload files from your SD card on your phone or make a new document just like in the old docs app Google Drive is available now for mac pc and android tablets and phones and it will be available on iOS pretty soon you