Google Drive

Though barely a year old, Google Drive is already a very popular service. It's easy to use if you already have a Google account, and its prices put Dropbox to shame. On Google Drive, 100GB costs a mere $5 a month (and Google even bumps up your Gmail storage to 25GB as a bonus). Dropbox charges double the price for 100GB.

Chafe at those Gmail storage limits no more: Now, all your Google Drive space is your Gmail and Google+ Photo storage space, too.

It's been a tough Monday morning for some Google Drive users who have been dealing with a service outage.

Gmail users will soon be able to share documents stored in Google Drive without leaving the Gmail interface. Drive, and Google Docs before it, have always allowed users to share links to files using Gmail. But users have always had to share files from the Docs/Drive interface and never Gmail's, until now.

SkyDrive seemed destined to be another Microsoft also-ran product. Although introduced long before the current wave of cloud-based synchronization and storage services, SkyDrive had a number of frustrating limits, and comprised two separately named services (central and peer-to-peer file transfer) under one hood. Then Microsoft did something marvelous. The same week that Google released its long-expected Google Drive, Microsoft unveiled a thorough revamping of SkyDrive into an explicable and competitive service. (Microsoft lists the version that I reviewed as version 16.4.)