14 DAY TRIAL // Surprising no one, Google has said that there are plans to integrate Google Drive into Chrome OS. Considering that the blog post announcing Drive was written by Google Senior VP Sundar Pichai, head of the Chrome division, that's not much of an unexpected development.
Drive will be tightly integrated with Chrome OS, Google is working on it at the moment. The plan is to have it working in Chrome 20, which is already in the Dev channel for Chromebooks, Samsung Series 5, Acer AC700 and the Cr-48.
Chrome 20 will hit the stable channel some 12 weeks from now, so it's going to be a while before most users will get to see it in action, but anxious users can switch to the dev channel and enjoy it now.
With Chrome OS focused exclusively on the web, Google Docs has always been a good companion for Chromebooks. That won't change, but what will change is that everything in Google Docs, now Drive, will be accessible offline on the device.
That's how Drive works on any other platform, the difference is that there's no special interface, the Drive website is all you get, though the files will be visible with the file browser and accessible to any other app on the device.
But, for all intents and purposes, Drive will become the file system, anything you save on the device is saved in Drive and synced to the web. The Drive integration will be optional though, users won't be forced into it.
With only 5 GB offered for free, Drive is not much of a value proposition to Chromebook users, though that may prove sufficient since they're already used to running web apps which store everything in the cloud.
That's an advantage as well as a disadvantage. On the one hand, everything that's stored in the cloud doesn't have to stay on the device and is accessible from everywhere. On the other, everything is scattered among various websites and apps.