With Google clearly feeling extremely confident about the future of Glass, and with a whole heap of new users likely to come on board, Google has announced that Glass Updates are back. Owners of the powerful Glass headset will be able to update its firmware later this week and receive a number of powerful updates that should boost the overall Glass experience for end-users.
Installing the latest software update – when it launches later this week – will mean that Glass units will be running the latest version of Android, which is KitKat. Having KitKat installed on the wearable may not represent a huge change to the actual wearer of the headset, but it does bring with it a number of important benefits, both immediately and in the near future. Battery life on Glass should be immediately improved, as should the update process going forward, thanks to the KitKat implementation. Google has also made it clear that change allows developers to write Glassware using the latest Android SDK and GDK.
The software update also introduces a number of improvements to how photos and albums are handled on the device. Users who capture a lot of images using Glass will be pleased to know that photos, videos and vignettes will now be organized into a daily “bundle” making it much easier to find media based on the day it was taken. Enhancements to the Hangouts app also means that users will now be able to reply in conversations with a photo attachment from one of the aforementioned bundles.
Google has also made some simple but effective changes to voice commands in Glass. Initiating a voice command session by saying “OK Glass” will now display previously stored commands listed in order of recency and frequency. If you use a particular voice command on a daily basis, or multiple times a day, then it’ll appear at the top of the list.
There’s undoubtedly a lot of great additions to the Glass software, but there’s also a fairly big feature being removed. Google has taken the decision to remove video calling for the time being, citing that the service is only used by approximately 10% of Glass users and in its current form just isn’t living up to its “high standards“.
The complete list of changes are as follows, according to Google’s post on Google+:
We’ll be sure to bring you more on this update when Google updates the Glass Journal with the full change log.
(Source: Google Glass [Google+])
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