Geek News

Dropbox has been positioning itself as a competitor to Google Docs and Drive for a while now -- the company arguably brought cloud-synced storage to the masses, and recent partnerships with Microsoft Office have given it robust document-creation and collaboration features. So it's a bit surprising to see Dropbox announce a major partnership with Google today: the service will soon be able to connect with Google's G Suite. What's most important to know there is that users will be able to create Google Docs, Sheets and Slides files directly within Dropbox. We haven't seen exactly how this will work yet, but it's probably not dissimilar to what Dropbox did with its Microsoft partnership. Dropbox's iOS and Android apps are tightly integrated with Word, Excel and Powerpoint, letting you create new files in Dropbox and then jumping right into Office to take care of the details. Similarly, your Dropbox storage can be linked to an Office online account. If we had to ...

It's been almost a year since Google first mentioned Hangouts Chat -- a totally redesigned messaging service that's more like Slack than the Hangouts most consumers know today. As of now, Hangouts Chat is out of its "early adopter" program and will be available to all G Suite users over the next week, assuming their company enables it, of course. To be clear, Hangouts Chat is a totally separate and distinct service from Hangouts proper, which still lives in your Google mail inbox. And while we'll forgive you for rolling your eyes at yet another chat service from Google (the number of different apps the company has built is legendary at the point), Hangouts Chat does offer something potentially valuable to companies using G Suite -- assuming they're not on Slack already. Just like Slack, Hangouts Chat features virtual rooms for different parts of a company's team or to organize people around a specific project or task. Each room can hold up to 8,000 pe...

Lately, Google has been putting a lot of focus on its lightweight "Go" Android apps that are meant for countries where good cellular coverage and bandwidth in general is difficult to come by. YouTube Go started out in only one country -- sure, it was India, but there were still plenty of other places where the app would be useful. As of today, many more countries will be able to use YouTube Go. More than 130, in fact. If you haven't heard of YouTube Go before, it offers the key features of YouTube along with a lot of data management options. Users can download videos at three different quality sizes and share them with other phones without using any data at all. It also features previews, so you can check out a video before streaming or downloading it. The app itself is less than 10MB, and Google specifically made it work with slower phones with less storage, and it works on much older versions of Android -- all the way back to 4.1 Jellybean, in fact. In addition t...