Google is reportedly prepping a cloud-based storage service called 'Google Drive' or 'GDrive', which will be launched in the first week of April. Dubbed as a Dropbox rival, Google Drive service will offer 1GB of free storage and charge for additional storage space. Dropbox, however, offers 2 GB of free storage with a number of options to acquire more.

GigaOM's Om Malik, citing 'well-placed sources familiar with the company’s plans', reports Google will offer its service to Google Apps customers, and also include third-party developers into the service, allowing users to save and load files directly from Gdrive.

“Interestingly, it will launch for Google Apps customers and will be domain specific as well. Google has also built an API for third party apps with this service so folks can store content from other apps in the Google drive,” he notes. The GigaOM author, however, points out there's a long history of false alarms relating to Google's cloud-based storage service.

First rumours of Google's GDrive surfaced in 20006 and then in 2007 The Wall Street Journal published a story on GDrive, it's learnt. In 2010, Google upgraded its Google Docs services, allowing users to upload documents and files. Soon after the move, rumours started again and once again triggered by a WSJ report.

According to reports, Google's Drive service will have an interface similar to the current Gmail service and will allow users to store documents and PDFs. Rumours of Google's cloud-based storage service come shortly after HTC announced closure of its cloud service HTCSense.com. HTC on its site said that it is revamping its cloud service will come up with an improved version of it very soon.

Cloud based storage services are the next major thing that mobile phone makers aim to offer to their customers. Just yesterday, HTC announced to shut down HTCSense.com for renovation and better integration of cloud servers based storage and phone set up service - Dashwire.

Back in India, the market of cloud services is projected to grow by $15-18 billion by 2020. Google and Microsoft are reportedly competing with each other to grab a share of the Indian market.