"Google believes that users should have a choice in what applications they use for editing text files. Built to support industry standards, Google Text enables Google users to press letters on their keyboard, and those letters will then appear in a Google Text document. Users can string these letters together to form whole words, even complete sentences. Google says that users will be able to create entire paragraphs of words and sentences, and, for the advanced computer users, complete documents.

Google Text uses industry standard ASCII text and provides innovative features such as 'cut and paste' and the 'deleting' of mistyped characters.

Google Text currently only has client support for Windows, but Google reportedly said that a web based client is in the works. The web client will provide support for Apple OS X and Unix platforms, but the web client will only support a limited subset of the characters that users can type in the windows based client. It has been reported that the web client will support the letters 'a', 'f', and 't', and the numbers '2' and '7'. Google says they are not planning any other characters at this point, but reminded that Google Text is in beta.

Yahoo has stated that their competing product "Yahoo Pad" is set to be released in a few months...