Hands on with Google Drive (Review)
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, ZDNet
To install Google Drive as a local client—ala the Dropbox model where the cloud drive appears in your operating system’s file manager as just another directory—you need to have either a Mac or Windows system. Mind you, Google Drive also will work just fine with Linux… but only from your Google Drive Web page. I’m not happy about that.
To get the program, or to use it on the Web, you’ll need to have a Google account. With Google’s recent privacy changes, not everyone will want to do that. Personally, I don’t have a problem with Google’s new policy. But , as Zack Whittaker points out, nothing on anyone’s cloud drive should be regarded as being all that private when push comes to shove.
If you’re OK with all that, the first step is to go to the Google Drive Start page. From here, you click on the Go to Google Drive button on the upper right. If you have a Windows or Mac, you can then download the Google Drive application. This will give you a local Google Drive client that will then keep your files synced between your local PC and your cloud-based Google Drive.
Google Drive review
Serenity Caldwell, Macworld.com
One caveat for heavy Google Docs users: Once you sign up, Drive will replace your Docs tab on the Web. Though it doesn't get rid of your saved documents, it does move a few things around.
Within the Google Drive tab on the Web, your documents have now been sorted into two categories: My Drive, and Shared With Me. Even if you've chosen not to sync Google Docs on your local drive, any Google document you personally own, along with any folders you've made, will show up under My Drive on the Web; Shared With Me contains any document that's been shared to you. As such, documents you don't own will not be synced by default to your Drive—you can add shared files by dragging them from Shared With Me to My Drive.
As with Google Docs before it, you can easily share a document or external file with others on Google Drive, though it requires using the Web interface.
Google app review video shows Share to 'Drive' option
Darren Murph, Engadget
To close out each week, the Android Developer Relations team hosts a Friday App Review video. This Friday, however, the focus is far from whatever apps are being showcased (psst... it's Handy Scanner); instead, all eyes are on the Share to 'Drive' option, seen just below the 'Bluetooth' logo in the screen capture above. It's shown at the 32:53 mark in the video just after the break, and while this certainly isn't confirmation that Goog's own cloud storage service will be hitting the masses soon, it's one of the more tangible pieces of evidence that Google Drive is at least a real initiative. Come to think of it, we've got a couple of passes to Google I/O 2012, which just so happens to get going in around two months. Anyone else feeling that tug of puzzle pieces coming together?