Google's long-rumoured online storage service called GDrive may be coming out sooner than originally planned, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
According to the publication, the GDrive could become available in just a few short months and will compete with the likes of Microsoft's SkyDrive, AOL's Xdrive and Apple's iDisk.
GDrive to be a dual-tiered service
The Wall Street Journal is also claiming that the service will come in both free and paid versions, although pricing for the paid versions is still unknown at this point. To help bolster its adoption, Google will be integrating its other services like Picasa and Google Docs with GDrive so users can easily store all their files online together.
GDrive, or whatever it is eventually called, is actually a bit late in the realm of online storage solutions. Apple is currently offering its iDisk as part of its .Mac service with up to 10GB of storage. Microsoft's SkyDrive service is currently in beta and offers 1GB of free storage, while higher-capacity paid versions are expected next year. Finally, AOL's Xdrive service offers 5GB of online storage for free, but boasts up to 50GB of storage for just $10 (£5) per month.
Laptop innovations
Fujitsu on Tuesday announced an update to its 5,400rpm mobile hard drive from 250GB of storage to 320GB. Dubbed MHZ2, the new 2.5-inch drive features an 8MB buffer, a 3Gbit/s SATA interface, and power consumption of 1.9 watts when reading or writing data. The Fujitsu drive will be available in February for an undisclosed price.
Dell has finally completed revamping its XPS notebook line with the XPS M1530. The slim notebook is just 0.9 inches deep at its thinnest point and features a slot-loading optical drive. It also comes with a 128MB GeForce 8400M GS graphics chip, a 2-megapixel webcam and a fingerprint reader for added security.
The base system starts at just $999 (£480) for a 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB of memory, and a 120GB hard drive, but that price can quickly rise to over $1,499 (£720) if you want to max out the specs with a 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of memory and a 250GB hard drive.
