This is a huge boost for Google Drive, in a way that the service can now be used as a digital file cabinet of sorts, whereas before it was merely just a cloud storage system to stash all of your Google Docs and other various files. With document scanning, Google Drive takes Evernote and other note-taking apps head on.

The feature is pretty self-explanatory, in that you simply tap the “+” sign to add a file and tap on “Scan.” From there, you take a snapshot of a physical document and Google Drive will automatically save it as a PDF file and upload it to your Drive account. You can also crop and rotate the snapshot before you upload it to your Drive.

Currently, Evernote remains one of the top note-taking and document-archiving services around, and its scanning abilities, as well as its OCR text recognition is one of Evernote’s most popular features. Google Drive can certainly give Evernote a run for its money, especially since it automatically saves docs as a PDF and you can download them easily — Evernote can do the same, but it’s a bit tricky to figure out at first.

Of course, we can’t forget about Google Keep, which is the search giant’s new note-taking app that also competes with Evernote. Keep allows users to scan business cards, although it hasn’t been touted as one of the bigger features of the app. In any case, this changes the game for Google Drive, and makes archiving physical documents a whole lot easier — a process that we would never think about using Google Drive for in the past.

As for other new features in this Android update, there’s a new grid view that shows thumbnails of your various files. The app also now includes the ability to download files locally to your phone, but it requires Android 3.0 Honeycomb and higher. Furthermore, the Spreadsheet editor now supports changing fonts, colors, and cell alignment. And as always, there are a handful of bugfixes and general performance improvements. The update is available now.

VIA: Google Drive Blog

It appears to have been a snowball effect, with the Admin control panel and API going down at around 8:20 AM, with Gmail following at 8:58 AM. Google Drive then shut down at 9:01 AM, with Google Docs biting the dust at 9:11 AM. Google News also seems to be experiencing some issues on the back-end, but users are able to access the section just fine.

However, the “service disruption,” as Google is calling it, isn’t affecting everyone, and some users are reporting that all systems are nominal on their end, including yours truly, but we can’t help but feel slightly bad for those who can’t check their morning email when they got to their desks at the start of the work day.

There’s no word on when Google is planning to have these services back up and running for everyone, but we’re positive the company has top men and women on the job to get your Gmail back up and running, because we all know you can’t function without your daily feed of comical email forwards.

With the shutdown of Google Reader there’s been a bit of an outcry from the public – or at least the vocal part of the public – to keep it around for the future. Many – including the creator of the technology known as RSS himself – have made it clear that Google Reader is no longer a necessity as RSS-friendly services have appeared from so many different angles you’ll have a tough time NOT having a service to read all your favorite news sources with.

Google Keep, on the other hand, is a system that’s been rumored in the past and was made “prematurely public”, as it were, over the weekend. This system appears to be ready to use Google Drive to store information recorded as notes for your many multiple devices. This sort of system would go into direct competition with Evernote and OneNote and connectivity with Dropbox.

“The problem with Google Drive should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.” – Google

Above you’ll find the official Google response to the situation at hand with Google Drive. At the moment if you’re still seeing some distressing downtime, be sure to report to Google right away. They’ll be ready to knock down some walls and bring your free services back up to speed. Meanwhile have a peek at the timeline below for more information on Google Drive and its immediate past!

When putting together a presentation or sketching up a drawing in Google Drive, users can now use the research pane to search for content and help them with their project without minimizing or opening up another window. For example, you can add a photo from your Picasa album, or grab a quote from a friend’s Google+ profile and paste it into your project, all from the same window.

Just like when the research pane was first introduced, Google Apps users will still only be limited to web-only search results, since personal content search is intended for individual accounts only. However, most students for which this feature would benefit usually only have individual accounts anyway, so the limitation probably isn’t too much of an issue.

If you find that you’re not a big fan of the research pane and it’s just taking up precious screen real estate, you can easily toggle it on and off right from your document. However, those who heavily rely on the Google ecosystem will no doubt get some great use out of the new feature, and it’s a time saver that’ll shave a few minutes off of your project work session each time you use it.

There are three features Google is focusing on with this initial offering. The first is giving Google+ users the ability to share posts only with the other people in their organization. This means that users can share information with everyone else at their workplace quickly, without the worry that users in their other Google+ circles will see what they’re posting.

The second feature Google is focusing on is Gmail, Calendar and Docs integration with Hangouts. When a video meeting is initiated through Google Hangouts, users have the option of sharing a Google Doc with the rest of the people in the meeting, allowing “colleagues to write or edit a document together from anywhere.” Users can also join a Hangout directly from Gmail, and with today’s roll out, users can add a Hangout to Google Calendar and join the meeting straight from the Calendar entry.

Finally, Google has included a number of administrative features, allowing companies to set defaults for post restrictions for the entire company, or set up restrictions for Hangouts to facilitate private meetings within the company. Google will be rolling out these new features throughout the day, and promises more – including a mobile app – for the coming months. It will also be improving the offered features and adding new ones throughout this preview process. Stay tuned.

[via Google Enterprise Blog]

Offline functionality has been something of a theme at IO this week. Google Maps has been updated to support selective offline use, allowing Android device owners to select a portion of the map to locally cache. Meanwhile, Jelly Bean supports offline voice typing for Android phones and tablets.

The connection-free editing should also improve the user-experience of Chromebooks, which so far have only been fully functional when they’re online. Google added the ability to locally cache documents for reading on Chromebooks several months ago, but not editing.

Offline Google Docs will be available today, the search company says. You can sign up for a free account here, as part of Google Drive.

Searching for a topic gives you a stripped down results browser, which then presents you with several options. You can preview the link to make sure it’s what you’re looking for, insert the link into your document, or cite the website which will automatically create a footnote. Image results are presented in a similar way, and you can drag images from the Research panel straight into your document.

Quotes also work in the same way, and can again be inserted straight into your document with a author and link attribution automatically created. Maps and places have similar functionality, although map scales can be manipulated to give the best preview possible. The new feature should be rolling out to Google Docs users shortly if you don’t already have it.

To update your Google Docs environment, you’ll have to click your FONT menu and select ADD FONTS. From there you’ll be able to pick from a number of Google Web Fonts available. You can add the fonts you’d like to use multiple times to your everyday font menu if you like, all 450 of them!

In addition to fonts, there are several features Google has added to Docs to entice you to stick around in the cloud for the time being. First there are several new options for inserting images in your Docs. You can now insert images into your Docs via Google Drive, by searching in the LIFE Photo archive, or by taking a photo with your webcam – expansion!

The following additions have also been made to Google Docs:

• Accessibility in Docs got better with support for screenreaders in presentations and with the addition of NVDA to our list of supported screenreaders.

• From File > Page setup… you can now set the default page size for your new documents.

• It’s now easier for speakers of right-to-left languages by automatically showing bidirectional controls when you type in a language that might use them.

• Apps Script had many improvements, including
• • A new ScriptService for programmatically publishing your scripts and controlling when they run.
• • A new function to find the root folder of someone’s Drive.
• • An increase in the allowed attachment size in emails from 5MB to 25MB.
• • An increase in the size of docs files you can create from 2MB to 50MB.

• There are now over 60 new templates in our template gallery.

Google Docs, needless to say, has suddenly become better than ever. Students and web-based businesspeople rejoice!

Google Drive is Google’s cloud storage service. It’s an expansion of Google Docs, Picasa, and Gmail, each of which already had some storage abilities available for free for you to use as you wished whenever you liked. Now with the launch of Google Drive, these systems are all much more a part of one system of Google storage than they ever were before, and all of your data stored with Google can be accessed from one point: Google Drive.

Google Drive exists through several portals – desktop, web browser, and mobile. Through your smartphone, tablet, desktop (when your computer is connected to the web), Chrome browser, or any other brand of web browser for that matter, you’ll be able to access Google Drive’s online storage space. You can either choose to work with 5GB of space, this amount given to you free right out of the box, or with a whole lot more than that via a monthly fee paid to Google.

5GB: Free
25GB: $2.49
100GB: $4.99
200GB: $9.99
400GB: $19.99
1TB: $49.99
2TB: $99.99
4TB: $199.99
8TB: $399.99
16TB: $799.99

Google Drive works with apps such as Google Docs so you’re able to edit documents inside each of your Google Drive apps, they automatically saving to the cloud for whoever else you’re sharing them with to see updates immediately. Simple stuff, seeming to be simply powerful.

Google Drive is a new service, but more importantly than its new amount of space you’ll be given to place anything you like, it’s an exercise in branding. As Google has been rumored to be offering cloud space for free for many years, it’s become time to bring that space, now a new competition for services like Dropbox, to the public. You can access Google Drive through these outlets:

Chrome Apps that work with Google Drive
Google Drive App for Android in the Google Play App Store
Google Drive for the web

We’re expecting an iOS application sometime in the future, but we’re guessing Google will have to battle their way past Apple’s own iCloud initiative to get in, if they ever do. Meanwhile utilize this system via your web browser on your iPhone and iPad if you’ve got one, and head to the timeline below to learn more!

With the update, you can now access your Google Docs via your Android phone or tablet and edit them directly from within the app without bringing up the browser. You can simply join a document with a tap and see changes made to it in real-time like what’s offered in the Google Docs desktop version.

Other improvements include a slight face lift to the interface that makes working with documents easier while on the go. There’s now pinch to zoom, focus on a specific paragraph, and the ablity to quickly glance a whole document at once. Also added are rich text formatting, including quick bullet lists, changing document color, and bolding text. For a good overview of the updated features, you can watch the video below.

[via Android Community]

What this vision of what the cloud service appears to be quite similar to Google Docs, a system in which you can upload, store, and edit documents in the cloud. This service is currently used by business owners and students the world over, with Google Drive perhaps looking to expand the program with the doors wide open to all manner of content. Also appearing today are two instances of the icon that will likely appear with the Google Drive environment – it consisting of a ribbon turning over itself three times to make a triangle in red, yellow, and blue.

This icon fits in quite well with the already colorful suite of Google icons for their apps such as Gmail and Google+ (both of which I’ve just realized are just red and white, but still, the original G+ icon was six colors!) Also included in this leak are the words “Install Google Drive” which makes us think that this service will include a desktop app which will facilitate the uploading and downloading of content to and from the Google Drive cloud, much like DropBox has now. Is DropBox about to feel a world of hurt at the hands of the mighty infinite-space-having Google machine?

[via Geekwire]

Instead of creating an entirely separate app for Honeycomb, the friendly people at Google in their labs creating sweet creations have infused the functionality into the original app, thus creating an app that has the ability to look and feel great on any sized display. Three panel view exists now, allowing you to see separations between folders, documents, and the contents of those documents all at once.

Thumbnail previews are included all the way on the right, while tapping a preview brings you into a much larger view for editing. This app is currently available in 46 different languages and the features are functional on tablets with Android 3.0 and above, while when used on handsets the functionality reverts to the handset look. You can download the app completely for free from the Android Marketplace.

That said, we must assume that this app is set to go for next week’s reveal of the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich, the newest version of Android, one that ties together both the Honeycomb OS for tablets and Gingerbread for handsets. We’ll be there LIVE to let you know the true business! It’s a winning combination, and it’s pumped up for Docs!

[via Android Community]

Gmail

Google’s mail app will first of all have a brand new inbox preview pane. This pane will now allow you to scroll through your giant lists of messages and their contents and see small previews of the messages as you go. You can also mark messages “read” from here now as well. This feature in particular needs to be enabled from the Labs area in Settings – though it may come out for all users soon – and you’ve got the choice of either a vertical or horizontal split in your Gmail window.

Your Gmail interface has also been improved while you’re looking at it in a mobile browser, especially if you’re looking at it through a high-resolution display. You can also pull down your menu to activate a “release to refresh” feature. Check out more on this update [here.]

Google Docs

Google Docs is about to get some large interface improvements, this included in a much larger Google-wide project to simplify and streamline their applications. You’ll notice these changes falling very much in line with the aesthetic of their Google+ social networking project. This update will be rolling out to everyone eventually, while you can peek at this look by hitting “Try the new look” under the gear icon in your upper right. There are a whole bunch of new keyboard shortcuts now in play as well, typing “?” inside Docs will bring up a cheat sheet to see them all.

New chart types, and chart improvements for documents and drawings

There are automatic spreadsheet function snippets throughout many Google apps such as Google Translate. When you see a spreadsheet such as the one posted here, you’ll be able to type into a cell as you normally would any spreadsheet, but this will bring up a list of matching functions instantly, each of them selectable. Each of these functions have a hover feature which tells you what they do.

Spreadsheet charts have been made much more powerful and easier to work with on the whole, creating a chart now as simple as copying and pasting to embed into a document or drawing. There are several types of charts to choose from now, those being candlestick, combo, GeoMaps, and TreeMaps.

What this means for you, the user

As always, these updates will be rolling out to you immediately if not soon. You wont have to do anything special to work with these improvements, just keep on working as you usually do and the goodness will come to you. That said – have any of you been using these updates and have NOT been enjoying them?

Tell us why!

[via Google]

The new layout now adds two new dropdown buttons to the top left corner of the screen. The first dropdown button is Sort which lets you organize your documents list by name, by last modified, and by last opened. The second dropdown is Narrow by and lets you specify a subset of documents.

A new share button is added to the bottom left corner of the screen and appears when you’ve selected one or more documents from your list. You can select multiple documents and then click the Share button, which will give you the option to Share, Get the link to share, or Email as attachment.

[via Google Mobile Blog]

Older browsers to have their support phased out starting this fall, include Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3, and all of their predecessors. Google says that these browsers simply cannot support the HTML 5 needed for new Google Apps to work. For instance, the desktop notifications in Gmail and the drag-and-drop file uploading in Google Docs.

Google will continue to support up to three of the most recent browser versions on a rolling basis for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Whenever a new version is released, support for the third-oldest version will be dropped.

[via Google Enterprise Blog]

The app will make it easy for you to filter and search for your content across any of your Google accounts and jump straight into editing via the online mobile editors. Your documents can also be easily shared with contacts on your phone from within the app. Additionally, content can be uploaded from your phone, documents can be directly opened from Gmail, and shortcut widgets can be added to the home screen for your most common tasks.

But perhaps the standout feature is the integration of OCR (Optical Character Recognition). This feature along with the use of your phone’s camera can convert photos with text into editable documents. The process is as simple as tapping the “Document from Photo” option or selecting the camera icon from the widget. The converted document will appear in your documents list ready for editing. Photos already stored on your camera can also be converted via OCR.

The Google Docs app works for smartphones with Android 2.1 and above. It is available for download at the Android Market.

[via Android Community]

Jolicloud notes that the new feature is available right now and if you don’t see if you just need to refresh your desktop. To set the new feature up the user needs to follow the steps on the Jolicloud blog. Once setup is complete, the Google Docs will appear in the browser and users can browse other files uploaded to Google Docs in addition to documents.

Previews are supported as well. The Google Docs feature is persistent too so you won’t have to jump through hoops to access the documents each time. Anytime you log on the documents will be available to you. Jolicloud also has a Chrome app that will let you use it as a home page.

Discussions is a feature that appears on the upper right-hand side as a dropdown menu. You can send the discussion to people through their e-mail and have them jump into the conversation, or send a notification through e-mail to someone during a conversation with a “@mention”. The format of the discussion is like a chat room and there are profile pictures and timestamps each time someone writes something. Once you’re done using Discussions you can end it with discussion resolution to get rid of it from the document.

Google has provided a funny little demo video for the new feature to show how it all works. It really looks like it will help streamline collaborative projects for work, or pranking somebody like in the video. It’s pretty neat to see other people edit the document in real-time while it’s open on your screen. Discussions is only compatible with new Google Docs documents starting today, older documents that have been uploaded will not work.

[via Business Insider]

The 12 new file types are:
• Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
• Apple Pages (.PAGES)
• Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
• Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
• Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
• PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
• TrueType (.TTF)
• XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

It used to be that if you sent a Photoshop or an AutoCAD file, that the person receiving it would need to have those respective software applications in order to open and view the file. With this update, the majority of file types will be viewable simply using Google Docs Viewer without the hassle of opening another software application. In Gmail, attachments with these files will now have an additional “View” link as opposed to just “Download.”

[via Google]

Google’s New Document Editor now supports editing in your mobile Browser. Of course, there are a few limitations. Google is rolling out the new document editor for mobile over the next few days, and it will be only available for English-language users at first. It will also only be supported for Android devices that are running Android 2.2 (FroYo), or iOS devices with version 3.0 or later, which includes the iPad. Of course, Google will be adding more support for more languages later.

Check out the video below to see it in action.

[via AndroidCommunity; via Google Docs Blog]

From Around the Web

Kudo Tsunoda Says Hardly Anyone Plays FPS Games on PC: If hearing Kudo Tsunoda, one of the creators behind Microsoft’s upcoming Kinect, talk about how Microsoft’s future motion-sensing peripheral will outsell the iPad isn’t enough for you, here we’ve got the Microsoft head saying that no one plays First Person Shooter (FPS) titles on PC anymore. He goes on to say that “It’s all about the console now.” Of course, he was talking about how Halo made console FPS titles what they are today, and that’s to be expected. But we imagine there’s plenty of PC gamers out there, with their mouse clicking away to fire their favorite assault rifle in their favorite FPS, that would disagree with this statement. [via GameInformer]

R3 Media Network

SlashGear

HP and Oracle Resolve Litigation, Still Working Together
Leica Showcases a 22,000 EUR M9 Titanium Limited Edition
Nokia N8 Delayed for a Few More Weeks
Apple Buys Polar Rose, AR Recognizr Could be Coming to iPhone
Clearwire Rover Puck Review

AndroidCommunity

Adobe Patches Flash Player 10.1 Vulnerability for Android
Chrome OS Chosen Over Android for Next Samsung Galaxy Tab
Sprint Showcasing New Epic 4G Media Hub Advertisement

SlashPhone

Google Docs Will be Editable on Android and iOS
The iPhone 4 is Coming to China

Another big announcement for the company sees the huge improvements to their cloud-based security. Initially segregated to large companies with enough money to spend for it, Google is right now offering two-step verifications processes for those who want to sign into Google Apps. As of right now, it’s being offered to only subscribers to Google Apps Premier, Education, and Government Edition administrators to employ. The two-step process includes inputting your password, and a one-time verification code provided by a mobile phone. Google hopes that, in the next couple of months, they can roll out this new security feature to Standard Edition users, as well as every other individual Google user out there.

And then, finally, there’s mobile editing coming to Google Docs. And while its inclusion in Android-based handsets makes sense, there are a lot more people wanting to edit their documents on Google Docs from Appel’s tablet. And that’s finally coming. In the next few weeks, Google will introduce the mobile editing feature for Android handsets, as well as Apple’s iPad. That means you’ll be able to co-edit from around the world, a lot more easily.

[via Android Community]

So, what’s the big deal? Well, with the connection to Facebook, Docs.com works as a social networking tool just as much as an online document creation tool. Docs.com connects directly to your Facebook profile, and you’ll be able to share documents with your Facebook friends, collaboratively edit what you create, and sneak a peek at the documents that your friends have created on their own time. Users can choose to make their created documents public or private. Additionally, right on your Facebook page you can add a new tab that will list all the documents you’ve shared with your profile.

Additionally, while you can upload Microsoft Office and other text documents to Google Docs, Docs.com is integrated with not only Facebook, but also Microsoft Word, and the full Office suite. The sharing capabilities are a bit expanded, obviously, as the scope of Facebook has been fused with the entire effort. But, it doesn’t take a blind man to see that this is a direct attack at Google, and the services they provide. It will take some major effort from Microsoft to get Docs.com where it needs to be to compete with Google Docs, especially considering the major lead Google’s service has in the market. But, Microsoft has tried crazier things, and there’s nothing hurting the Redmond-based company by having Facebook helping out. As of right now it’s still in a closed Beta, but you can sign up at the site and be notified as to when you can test it out for yourself.

[via Docs]

As always, Google has pinned an informative video to their announcement, which we’ve happily included in the post for all you interested types. Of the new features for the word processing unit of Docs, you can expect: margin ruler, a new system for implementing numbered and bulleted lists, real-time collaboration with up to 50 people, tab-stops, and comments.

As for Spreadsheets, you’ll get: editing cells from the formula bar, the ability to drag-and-drop columns, along with auto-fill for good measure. There’s a lot more, and if you’re a fan of Google Docs, then you definitely need to go check out the alterations that Google has implemented. Plus, don’t forget the friendly and informative video.

[via Google]