On Tuesday Google launched Google Drive, becoming another competitor in the ever-growing cloud storage business. This product launch wasn’t a big surprise, as there were leaks and rumors about it for weeks before actual launch. With the help of our friends at Mashable and The Verge, we’ll break down what Google Drive is, and if it has the features to compete with the top dogs in cloud storage.

First of all, Google Drive is basically a revamped Google Docs with added features. Google Docs has been replaced everywhere in the Google sphere, with Drive now occupying that space. Existing users have been asked to upgrade their Docs account to the new Drive account, which comes with 5GB of free storage, which is better than some of the other free cloud storage sites (Dropbox only offers 2GB free storage to start off). Users can also chose to upgrade to larger storage sizes, all for pretty reasonable amounts.

Most of the interaction with Google Drive is all done in the web browser, but there are PC, Mac, and Android apps, along with an upcoming iOS app. One great feature of Google Drive is the included documents integration, which allows you to preview over 30 different file types while inside Drive, letting you scan and search your documents before opening. On that same note, Drive also has OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, meaning it can recognize text in scanned documents and will make that text searchable.

With Drive, there are also a few downsides, places where other cloud storage sites do things a little better. For one, there’s no easy way to make publicly accessible links to files and folders inside Drive, you have to go into the web app and go through some more advanced settings before being able to share files. Dropbox allows you to simply right click on files and get a link. Also, Drive forces you to the web browser a lot, clicking on a Google Docs link will open up the web browser, there’s no way to open it with any program on your computer.

So after looking at Drive’s feature set, what can we take away from it? For one, Google Drive performs well, with fast uploads and some very nice searching features. Drive may be lacking some nice features like ease of sharing, but this is the first iteration, and Google is known for updating and constantly improving its products. Therefore, if you already have a Google account, there’s no reason you shouldn’t take advantage of the 5GB of free storage offered to you with Drive. Take it for a spin, see if it can fulfill your needs for cloud storage, and if it would help replace carrying around flash drives.