After much rumor, speculation, and an accidental announcement post that launched this morning on the French official Google blog (that was subsequently deleted), Google has finally made Google Drive official.
Google Drive will offer 5 GB of storage for free, 24 GB for $2.49/month, 100 GB for $4.99/month, and 1 whopping TB of storage for $49.99/month. While the 1 TB of storage doesn’t come cheap, forking over $2.49 or $4.99 a month is pocket change. You can definitely part with your morning coffee for one day to pay for that amount of cloud storage.
Google Docs will now be integrated into Google Drive and it’ll function as it previously had. You’ll still be able to edit projects in real-time with others and share projects as you see fit. You’ll also be able to comment on any type of project, be it a Word document, PDF, or image, and receive notifications for new comments.
Google Drive also features a new search function, which will allow you to not only search by filename or file type, but also by text in scanned documents. Image recognition searches will also be allowed, although Google warns that it “is still in its early stages, and we [Google] expect it to get better over time.”
In celebration of Google Drive’s launch, Gmail’s expanded every user’s free storage from 7.5 GB to 10 GB. For those that opt to use Google Drive’s paid service, their Gmail storage will automatically be bumped up to 25 GB.
Google Drive is currently available for Mac, Windows, and Android, although Google promises that iOS support is coming soon.