After all the speculation, Google Drive has finally arrived. We take a look at its Android app avatar to see whether it lives up to the hype.
We had been hearing about it for a while now - Google was planning to start a cloud storage service of its own and it would be called Google Drive and it would be good enough to for you to stop lugging pen drives around. Well, Google Drive has finally been launched and is accessible from Web browsers, computers and handset apps. As of now, it only has an app for Android, but other platforms are expected to follow suit soon. Anyway, we signed up for Google Drive (you go to http://drive.google.com and sign up and Google informs you when your service is ready to use - in our case, it took about seven hours). Once you have got your Google Drive up and running, you can go right ahead and download the app from Google Play - you can download it even before your Google Drive service gets activated but it is always better to do so once the Drive’s up and running.
On starting Google Drive on your Android phone and tablet (we tried it on a Sony Xperia S an a Motorola Xoom), we would not blame you for thinking that you were in Google Docs. In fact, in a manner of speaking, you are. For Google Docs has now been absorbed into Google Drive. What you have, therefore, is 5 GB of free online storage with the Google branding, and - this is the important bit - an online office suite that is part of it. On starting the app, you see a list of items topped by My Drive, which is where the files and folders you have uploaded are stored; followed by Shared With Me, which has files shared with you by other people using Google Docs; Starred, Recent and Offline.
The real business of Google Drive on Android happens in the My Drive folder, into which you can upload virtually any kind of file that you wish to, in best cloud tradition. And in a very neat touch, the integration with Google Docs means that in many cases, you can not only view the files you have uploaded but can also edit them and if need be share them with other people. If Google Docs cannot open the file, fear not, you can specify an app on your device to open it, and if you are heading to an area where network connectivity is likely to be iffy, then just go right ahead and select the "make available offline" option which will download the file and move it to the Offline collection on your landing page. Editing options on Google Docs remain on the basic side, however. Do not expect MS Word like functionality and features here but if it is basic playing with fonts, listing and alignment you are after, there is enough here.
And of course, allied with this is the magic of cloud storage. Everything that you store on Google Drive will be accessible to you across all devices as long as you have an Internet connection. In fact, you can even just go to http://drive.google.com on your device’s Web browser to be able to view the files you have stored there - the app is a whole lot more convenient though. There are niggles, however. We found it very strange that the app did not let us create folders and that when we tried to send a file, the app insisted on downloading it, before giving us the option to mail it or send it over Bluetooth, instead of just giving us the option to send a link to it, in best cloud tradition. We were also very surprised to see that while we could sort the list of files we had uploaded by title, and time of editing and modification, there was no option to sort them by file type, which lead to formats intermingling and a good deal of confusion. In many cases, we also found the app downloading files (PDFs and videos) instead of opening them online or streaming them. We really hope Google fixes this in the coming days.
Still, these are early days and we are sure that the app is likely to get better in times to come. If it is just storage you are looking for, there is nothing compellingly different from the likes of Dropbox, Box.net or Skydrive here, but throw in Google Docs into the equation and you have one of the more comprehensive cloud storage and producitivity apps that we have seen in a while.
Right now, Google Drive is definitely one of those apps that power cloud users, who use the Net not just for storage but also for tweaking files and sharing, need to have on their Android devices. Yes, there's room for improvement. But even in its current avatar, it packs a very decent punch.
Get it from: Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.docs&hl=en)
Price: Free
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