iPhone and iPad apps for Google Drive

I recently wrote a group test of online drives with offline syncing for a magazine (is there a name for these things, there should be). You know the sort, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Wuala, OpenDrive, and SugarSync. Google Drive is good, but it didn't win. This was mainly because it lacked features compared to some of the other services.

I chose Microsoft's SkyDrive as the winner of the group test partly because these online drives are really useful on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones and there are some good mobile apps for SkyDrive. You can view Office documents stored on SkyDrive on your mobile device like Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, you can upload photos from the mobile device and view them as a slide show, and so on.

At the time I wrote the review Google didn't have iOS apps and a lot of people have iOS devices. Well, now there are iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch apps and they make Google Drive useful to a wider audience. Just search for it in the App Store on your device.

The Google Drive app enables you to view the files online, store a copy offline, share files and see what others are sharing with you. However, it still lags behind SkyDrive in some areas. For example, I can't see any way to upload files. It is so useful to be able to upload photos and videos from a mobile device and store them online. If you do have photos in Google Drive, saved from your PC perhaps, you can view them in the app. However, SkyDrive lets you swipe from one to the other in a perfectly natural way. Google Drive doesn't and it doesn't treat media in any way different to other files.

The main benefit of Google Drive is actually Google Docs. If you use Docs then Drive just makes it better, but other services are much more fun. Sign up for free space on SkyDrive or SugarSync and check them out, SkyDrive has Microsoft Office Web Apps of course, and SugarSync has a fantastic iPad app.