Google Drive gets file preview, Android app gets video streaming

The native Google Drive for Android has received an update that brings along a couple of new features as well as performance improvements. The web app too has received an update that makes it easier for users to take a look at the contents of the files on Drive with a preview feature.

Google promises a faster experience across the refreshed Android app even though it does not elaborate on the performance improvements that have been incorporated within it. A useful new feature added to the Android app is video streaming for phones running Android versions 3.0 and up. So if you have a phone running Honeycomb and up, you will be able to watch clips and videos shared with you by your family and friends on Google Drive.

We love the new Drive update

With this update, the presentation viewer will now support the pinch-to-zoom feature, turning it into a boon for users with smaller phone screens. This will probably make it easier to view and edit documents on the go without elaborate actions.

While Google has refreshed the Android version of Drive, it has not forgotten about adding some fun features to the web version of it. In a Google+ post (where else?) the company announced that you will now be able to quickly preview more than 30 file types and quickly flip between them until you find the one you need.

Of course, you can share, download, print or open the file with just a click. But here’s the best bit about the update – you can now select and copy text straight from the preview, even for PDFs. This is possibly the best update Google Drive has received in a long, long time. This feature will be rolling out over the next few days, says Google.

How the preview feature of Google Drive on the web will look like

Back in January, Google updated the iOS version of Drive and brought along multiple image and video upload features with it. The update bumped Google Drive to version 1.2.2, and let users upload multiple photos and videos together. QuickOffice users could open and save back to Drive too.The update also addressed font support issues in Google Docs, and the Helvetica Neue fonts were finally supported.

The update also gave users the ability to format cells in Sheets. Users can format cells to denote decimals, currency, dates and more using Drive’s spreadsheet feature. The update to Sheets included the ability to scroll diagonally. This is bound to help people who work with heavy spreadsheets to scroll through data faster. Slides also received improved slideshows and animations, and you can pinch-to-zoom on individual slides.

It looks like Google is refreshing its iOS and Android app every two months. Essentially, every month we are going to find updates for either of the apps on their respective stores. We like this move, Google! What a great way to stay in the competition.

You can download Google Drive for Android here.