My thoughts on Google Drive

[StuMcBill]

Well I have installed Google Drive on my Galaxy Nexus, Transformer Prime and my Windows 7 PC, and I have a few thoughts about it.

1. Google need to implement a mechanism, possibly using Drive, so if I play a game and save on my Nexus, it should be possible to instantly have that save game available on my Prime if I have the same game on my Prime and I can carry on instantly?

2. I think it has a lot of potential, but I think it needs to be like iCloud, so if you take a picture, buy a music file, buy a movie, it needs to be available on all my devices instantly! And it also needs to be available on Windows, OSX, Linux and any other operating system.

3. It really needs to be "seamless".

Any thoughts? I did think of other things while I was out and about but I can't recall them just now, if they come to me I will post again!

Sent from my Amiga 500 using Workbench

 

[Maikai.Guy]

Well I have installed Google Drive on my Galaxy Nexus, Transformer Prime and my Windows 7 PC, and I have a few thoughts about it.

1. Google need to implement a mechanism, possibly using Drive, so if I play a game and save on my Nexus, it should be possible to instantly have that save game available on my Prime if I have the same game on my Prime and I can carry on instantly?

Google already did everything they can by making Android a file based system. The type of functionality you're talking about would need to be created by the game developer. The game itself needs to look for a particular file in a particular location. Google can't change the code of your games.

2. I think it has a lot of potential, but I think it needs to be like iCloud, so if you take a picture, buy a music file, buy a movie, it needs to be available on all my devices instantly! And it also needs to be available on Windows, OSX, Linux and any other operating system.

If you take a picture, it is sent up to your Google+ account and is available on any and all platforms at once.

If you buy anything from the Play Store, including books, movies, games, etc..., it is available on all your Android devices, as long as they are logged in using the same user credentials. If you buy anything from Amazon's Android Store it is the same. Can't speak for other sources, as I do not use them.

3. It really needs to be "seamless".

Any thoughts? I did think of other things while I was out and about but I can't recall them just now, if they come to me I will post again!

Sent from my Amiga 500 using Workbench

Not enough information. Is "seamless" a catch-all for your other observations? Please define seamless.

Thoughts?
Little about Google Drive is new. The space in which things are stored used to be part of Google Docs. In fact, Google Docs are still stored there. I think Google has made a marketing blunder in rolling out Google Drive as if it is a new service. It makes them look like they are following iCloud when in fact, they have been leading the way and have provided "cloud" backup for years.

 

[Speedygi]

As far as I'm concerned, Google Drive is Google's version of Dropbox, and seriously nothing we have not seen before. If only Google can do something out of the box with it, something like downloading game files on the fly from it, or for...

I guess that's all I think Google can improve on this, but then again I am not as smart a fella as those people in Mountain View. I hope they are way smarter in knowing how to push truly innovative features with Drive.

 

[MrSmith317]

In order to sync things like game saves(which only a small percentage of users care about) to Google Drive, they'd have to write a new API and have all game devs make use of it. Which is less about Google Drive and more about the game devs.

As "cloud" storage, Google Drive is perfectly acceptable in my book. It's nothing new/special, but it makes genuine competition among the storage providers. So if everyone else has to step their game up, I'm good with that.

 

[Lee_Bo]

Dropbox was a little "rough around the edges" when it was released too. Give the developers time to work out the kinks.

And if you go to Google support site, you can submit suggestions for change, and they do get read. I had two ideas for the Google Apps Device Policy that we use on 35 Android tablets for our service techs. It took six months, but they did listen and made the changes.

 

[Ravynmagi]

Main issue I'm having with Google Drive at the moment is what it does to my video files. It encodes them down the size of a postage stamp and they end up being some square heavily pixelated mess I can't recognize anymore. Really wish this terrible feature could be disabled.

Other than that, it seems like it's off to a decent start. I think it's up to the developers to start including support for it in their apps, and I hope they do embrace it more than they have Dropbox so far.