After more than 2 years of waiting and anticipation, last Saturday morning I finally got to try on Google Glass. For the sake of full disclosure, I'm both a bit of a Google fanboy and have been dreaming about Glass since I first saw the concept video.
When that video was released in April 2012 the tech world was full of wonder and cynicism. There was the usual flood of love from people like me, who love new gadgets and concepts that bring elements of the sci-fi we grew up with, to life but there were also a huge number of naysayers, mostly cynical that the quality of the display shown would be several years away from the market.
Then at I/O Google launched the device with a spectacular skydiving stunt and with the Explorer program launching a few months later, the device was on the market (albeit in a limited form).
I have been fairly desperate to try Glass and I see possibilities every day. So when Google announced a demo event in London, I was straight online and booking my appointment for when it opened.
It isn't just the photography and video capabilities or the notifications of emails and messages that mean my phone can stay in my pocket, it is the more speculative ideas too.
Wouldn't it be cool if when you drove onto your driveway, a glance at the garage or a voice instruction €œOk Glass, Open the garage€ would automatically let you park?
Wouldn't it be cool if you could look at a specific lamp in your living room say €œOk Glass, switch on that light€ and have it turn on. Google Now understands the idea of the follow up instruction so you could add €œDim it slightly€.
Looking at it from the perspective of a roofer, the most obvious use would be to play videos if you need clarification on best practices or to check the manufacturers website for their instruction documentation but, as I found, actually using Google Glass gave me a number of ideas that I would not have thought possible (but I'll discuss those later).
Construction
Google Glass is made from a curved titanium frame that has the nosepieces and the main Glass components attached. The standard frame has attachment points for sunglasses or clear lenses and a number of prescription frames are available that integrate the actual device.
The main part of Glass is made from plastic with the clear eyepiece mounted on a hinge at the front so you can move it in an arc and focus it. The battery part is mounted behind the ear and balances the weight well.
There is a long thin touchpad on the forward part of the arm, a button to manually take a picture and on the inside an on/off button that activates Glass when you put it on your head.
Inside, the new version gets 2Gb of RAM but still has the original chipset (the same as the Galaxy Nexus, an OMAP 4430 chip) as well as the original camera which takes 5Mp stills and 720p video.
It is light and there is some flex to it. The construction seems generally good but possibly not good enough for a £1000 device. Of course, the lightness is there to help with being able to use it all day so I'm not sure how much they could change this but I would feel the need to treat it gently to avoid breaking it.
I didn't have time to get contacts before the event so I wore my normal prescription frames and wore Glass over the top. This may have caused some of the issues that I experienced and I will mention when I think this caveat should be taken into consideration.
Display
The display is simple, yet as you use it, increasingly impressive. Indoors, the display was clear, bright and easy to use from the start. I spent some time trying to catch it out, by positioning the display in front of spotlights and although the detail in the display was mostly washed out, the text was still visible. The only time it was hard to read was when I positioned it over the main windows with direct sunlight on them. I could make out the text when concentrating but, to be fair, it was difficult to even look in that direction for any length of time as the sun was so bright.
When a new app or page loads there is a progress bar along the bottom of the display. This is useful but strangely large compared with some of the more delicate UI touches employed, a thinner line would convey the same information without taking up so much of the screen area.
What surprised me was the sharpness of the screen and the amount of detail that can be shown. I will discuss the two most impressive apps for graphics in their own sections but suffice to say for the time being, the display is far better than I expected, didn't give me a headache (which some people have reported as a side-effect of having to look up in a slightly unnatural manner to see the display) and when focusing there was almost an augmented reality effect as your left eye took care of the peripheral vision and your right focused on the information.
Again, this effect was most pronounced with the WordLens and Star Chart apps which I will discuss later.
Controls
There are two methods of controlling Glass. The main method is through voice, which I will be talking about in the next section, and there is also a touchpad on the side of the device.
You'd have to be told that the area is a touchpad as there is, visually, nothing to differentiate it from the rest of the device.
The control system is simple, tap to start, sweep forward to go forward, sweep back to go back down to move down the menu and a two finger swipe to go back to the homescreen.
I found the system intuitive and, although I did occasionally get slightly lost in the menus, it was easy to find your way. If a swipe in one direction went the wrong way in the menu, just swipe the other way to go in the right direction.
With the limited time I had with Glass, I don't know whether this is something that habit overcomes and I'm not sure whether any indicator could be added in that would adequately solve this problem though. Possibly using a thin (vertical or horizontal - vertical is already the usual behaviour for menus) indicator of where you are in the list would enable you to more easily find your way around.
The two methods of control? Yeah, actually it's three. The motion of your head is used to switch on the display and Glass can also use the motion sensors to bring up different information as you look at different things.
Well, four really, as you can also wink to take photos as well, although I didn't try that at the demo.
Voice recognition
The voice recognition is pretty much the same as with Google Now except that the €œhotword€ is €œOk Glass€¦€ rather than €œOk Google€
With the first pair I tried, it started but then didn't want to also take a picture and consistently refused. However this was the first demonstration with 8 people standing around, all using exactly the same voice instructions, so I wouldn't consider this typical, however it does demonstrate that if you are using Google Glass to search when you aren't in a quiet environment, there may be some problems.
While you can use the menus to navigate to some of the functions and can take a picture or video without the voice recognition, this would be a limiting factor.
It would be useful to be able to use your paired, phone screen as an alternative method of text input in certain situations.
The other problem with voice recognition is that it is never a private search. I have the same issue with using Google Now often, especially in public. While it is useful to be able to ask natural language questions, what you ask Google is often odd, especially when heard as an isolated question, without the context that would explain.
However, this is a general problem I find with voice input and not something that is exclusive to Glass.
In general, however, voice recognition did seem to do a very good job of understanding the words used without a problem but I still think that certain words and phrases will need manual input and that is currently a problem with Glass.
WordLens
After the initial €œ...take a photo€ demonstration we were allowed to wander around the stations but the first option you were pointed towards was Word Lens (also available as an app on Android and iOS)
This app will translate foreign language and overlay the translation over the original text, matching the colour, font and even the angle that you are looking at the sign so that what you see on your screen looks simply like the different language version of that same sign.
While the app doesn't do anything different in the Glass version, the implementation is impressive and the specific use really brings one of the advantages of Glass to the fore, the immediacy of the interactions. While I have WordLens installed on my phone, it's not something that I use often and even when I need to look at foreign language text, it isn't the first thing I go to because it requires me to get my phone out, unlock it, find the app, fire it up *and only then* finding out my answer.
With Glass you say €œOk Glass, translate this€ and simply focus on the sign you want to translate. If you need to select a different language a tap on the touchpad brings up the menu and then sweeping forward or back moves you through the languages menu.
It is a little difficult to know which direction to navigate within the menus as you only see the current option and have to guess where you are in the menu or whether you need to go €œup€ or €œdown€ the choices. There is also no language detection that seems to be evident, something that seems a little odd considering Google's own Translate and it's implementations in Chrome etc seems to handle such a task very well. As a result, Wordlens is impressive but, perhaps, not as useful as it could be.
However, Wordlens was recently acquired by Google and it seems likely that the current functions of the two programs will be merged to provide a huge increase in functionality for Wordlens.
One additional thing to note is that the Wordlens implementation on Glass seems to be more precise than on my phone despite the vastly better hardware that the Nexus 5 has. The app seemed to work quicker and unlike the phone version, settled on a translation quickly that seemed accurate.
Song detection
The second of the app demos that I tried was the song detection function that is built into Glass using Sound Search.
Once again the instructions were simple and were primarily through voice controls. Simply say "Ok Glass, what song is this?" and, as long as you are close enough to the source of music, it detects the song, brings up the details of the track name and artist and then presents you with a moving list of lyrics too.
Karaoke will never be the same. It gives anyone the ability to join in with a band and sing along perfectly, simply ask Glass what the song is when the intro is playing and you get the lyrics and the timing handed to you.
Where previously, it was a cultural trope that people argued about minor general or specialist knowledge facts, like which other bands a musician played in, what minor parts in a movie a famous actor played when he was young and unknown etc. In recent years, a number of comedians have lamented that the advent of the internet and crowdsourced information has meant that the answer to these questions is available instantly, accurately and with references.
Soundsearch now threatens to do something similar with misheard song lyrics. Never again will people sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody that €œBeelzebub has a devil for a sideboard€ or that Jimi Hendrix sang €œ€˜Scuse me while I kiss this guy€
Again, this feature is available in Google Now, and similar apps have been around for a couple of years but the immediacy and ease of access through Glass makes it more available, more usable and more helpful.
One additional thing to note was that the particular Glass that I got given for the demonstration had a screen that was noticably dimmer than the other units. I was the first person in the queue and in the first group that tried the demos so I doubt that this was related to a discharged battery and I would assume that the brightness settings were set to a default/demo mode (something that should have been done but that may have been overlooked on this particular example)
Whether this was a settings problem or an issue with the display, I couldn't be sure but it was concerning on something that I would have to spend £1000 on, especially in the context of the first public demonstration of Google Glass in the UK.
Star Chart
The third main app that was demonstrated brought the elements of surprise and wonder to the event and was something that I could have, quite happily, stood around and played with until the battery ran out and the security men chased me off with pitchfork and flaming torches.
Similar apps are available for smartphones (and have been around for a few years) but again, the implementation on Glass seemed more polished, more immediate, more useful and, if you'd excuse the Apple-keynote-speech language, simply more delightful.
The app uses the motion sensors, inclinometer etc to detect where in the sky you are looking at and present you with a star chart to show the stars, planets, other astronomical bodies, the constellations, as well as tell you details about them all.
It is the presentation that really brings out the best in the app though. As you start to look for things, there is a square targeting selector that jumps from one nearest object to the next. The view you get moves smoothly and looks like an amalgam of every cool starfield map UI that you've seen in Sci-fi movies for the last few decades.
This impression is reinforced as you focus on one particular object, the targeting selector changes to a small circle and, when you wait a moment longer, the app starts telling you facts and figures about the distant body through the bone conductive speaker.
At the same time, the simple dots for objects and lines to indicate the constellations changes an the display becomes much more detailed, with a beautifully designed, nebulae-like artwork for the constellations drawing itself before your eyes.
It is a wonderful piece of software, a wonderful demonstration of how something on Glass can be significantly more usable than the same software on a phone and, although it's not exactly a killer app (one that is so useful that it compels people to buy the hardware for it) it is a real step in providing the surprise and delight that has been such a key factor in Apple's appeal and which contributed so much to their ability to establish new form factors for technology so quickly and so permanently.
One note here about that speaker. Google introduced an earbud for those who need it and, based on my experiences at the event, I would be one of those who need the earbud rather than using the bone conductive apparatus. There are two things that it's very important to consider with regard to the speaker. Firstly, I was wearing Glass over my prescription specs and so the arms of my glasses may have interfered with how that mic sent sound through to my ear and, secondly, all of the examples of Google Glass at the event had their speakers set at 50% volume.
I could just about hear that there was audio playing but couldn't make out what the words actually were. Even removing my prescription glasses and pressing the unit to my head to ensure contact with bone barely made any difference. Although the volume was set at 50%, unless the curve is exponential, I can't imagine that the 100% volume would be audible in anything less than an entirely silent room.
This may be a case of a single unit being a particularly bad example (like the dim display on the SoundSearch demo unit) but for me, I think headphones would be necessary.
Potential uses of Google Glass for roofers/construction workers
In the 40 minutes, or so, that I played around with Glass, a number of specific use cases came to mind for roofers (or anyone in construction)
The first (and probably most obvious) is to be able to, hands-free, be able to load and watch a short video to be able to confirm the best practice for a particular job. Whether it be the correct overlap of tiles, the best way to install flashing in a valley, or the correct procedure for installing a Duratech means-of-escape roof window instead of the more usual centre-pivot window, the ability to ask, download and watch the video without having to move anything more than your mouth and eyes would be incredibly useful.
Similarly, communication between workers would be dramatically improved by the ability to send a quick message that would be able to be read on the go. It seems a rather prosaic use for such a high tech piece of equipment but the ability to keep both hands on a half installed item while quickly getting a colleague to bring up some extra nails or a specialist hammer would be invaluable for many, seemingly mundane tasks.
It would also be very useful to show a client exactly what the problem on the roof is without them having to climb up a ladder to see it. Starting a Google Hangout and live streaming what the camera is looking at would enable the homeowner to be able to see what the problem was and the roofer would be more able to demonstrate the value of their work.
This would be particularly useful for more elderly or physically incapacitated clients and would help increase trust between the builder/roofer and those employing them. It would also be tremendously useful for those with a second home or where they are having to supervise construction work offsite; to be able to have the foreman take them around the building site and get them to make decisions based on what they see, rather than second hand from someone else.
You could stand on the ground and allow the inclination sensors and a bit of edge detection to help you work out the pitch of a roof automatically. An app could then give you a list of the tiles, slates or windows which would be suitable for your roof.
A WordLens like design app could allow you to select different roof window options and, instead of replacing words on a sign, you could use Glass to replace some of the tiles with the arrangement of windows that you want. Combination flashing kits can put multiple windows above one another, give you two or three windows side by side or 4 in a square and just like the different languages available, you could stroll through the options and see what your home would look like.
This would be tremendously useful in helping customers make final buying decisions and would allow easy access to the relevant parts of our catalogue.
You could have a different option (or a different app?) to look at your roof with different colour or profile roof tile or even with a slate roof instead.
Bit of guttering broken? With Google Goggles, or something like Amazon's new Firefly button, you could find and order the exact part you need in seconds, considerably faster than even the most perfectly optimised website.
You could use an image match to find the exact tile you need and buy what you need straight away.
You could do a lot with Glass, both as a roofer and as a retailer. The problem (once) again is that £1000 price tag and the limited availability that results.
Once Glass becomes a more normal bit of tech, once you can get a phone and Glass package with a 2 year contract, as you can with other wearables now, then these ideas become something to actually plan out. At the moment, with the likelihood of roofers buying Google Glass, it is only something that could be done and the only reason to follow through with it would be to gain some (very limited) publicity.
The demonstration event
The event itself was a bit of a mixed bag. The venue looked good, the staff were efficient, reasonably well informed and, for the most part, pleasant and friendly. However, it was definitely aimed towards simply showing the uninformed what Glass is, rather than also being for the nutters/enthusiasts who had been looking enviously across the Atlantic for years. There was no-one there who could answer any technical questions or could contribute more information than a basic demonstration of the functions and features.
The main problem of the demo was that it was impossible to actually see what it would be like to own Glass, rather than see what Glass can theoretically do in a few circumstances.
Wordlens, SoundSearch and Star Chart are all very well but without tying Glass to my account, getting notifications, emails, getting directions, sending IM's, photos, videos, sharing to G+ etc, etc, etc I am only scratching the barest surface of Glass and for a gadget that costs £1000, it is difficult for me to take that €œleap of faith€..
Even for a PC, where you know what you are looking for and don't need a demo, if you are spending a grand, you want to load up a game that you know and see how good the abilities are. With Glass though, despite few people in the UK having tried it, or knowing what it can do, you couldn't really try any of the day-to-day activities that you'd actually use Glass for.
So I spent very little time taking pictures or videos, because what was the point? I couldn't send the pictures to my account so that I could look at them later on a bigger screen. I could see that the camera points up slightly so that you have to angle your head to take a photo but I couldn't take a vignette or do anything else. There was no test account so that you could email, connect, talk, share etc and get a better idea of the real use cases.
Other than take pictures and try the 3 demo apps, you weren't told how to, or encouraged to, do anything else. The people that were there also didn't seem to be regular Glass users.
One of the nicer and more informed helpers told me that he'd been trying Glass out for a couple of days and was sad that he'd have to give them back but he couldn't tell me about his real experience with Glass, battery life etc and answer some of the concerns I had before the event.
One minor bonus was that, getting there early and being at the front of the queue, I got to see the rare rituals of the lesser spotted Google Glass demonstration staff and judge their dancing skills.
<sarc>They look so cool</sarc>
Areas of concern
There are a lot of things about Google Glass that I like, I like the idea and concept and have loved it since it was announced. At the same time there are things that worry me and there are a number of things that seem to be worrying lots of people.
What is worrying others seems to be mostly that people will be distracted and that people will be able to spy on others.
No, I'm not taking your picture. Why would I?
Lets debunk the later of these points first. It is no different to people having a camera phone or even an SLR, except the quality of the picture will be lower, the sensor smaller, with no zoom. It is also an incredibly conspicuous piece of technology, especially at the moment. People are going to notice that you have Glass on, probably before you notice them staring.
Additionally, when taking the photo, the screen lights up and can be easily seen from the outside and there is a light that comes on too.
Now, while these can be negated with software (although Google is keeping a tight rein on the apps) there are some things that can't be. The position of Glass on your face is overt and not given towards secrecy and, where you could hold a smartphone surreptitiously and take photos under the cover of checking your emails, with Glass it is the opposite and even if you're just trying to check your emails, people will assume that you are taking photos.
Only one of the methods for taking the photos/videos is at all covert. Speaking aloud is obvious as is reaching up to your unsubtle smartglasses and pressing a button but €œwink€ does mean that you would be able to take a photo without making it too obvious. Any risk you run by wandering around the country and winking at random people shouldn't be discounted though, unless you have the sunglasses on, the wink isn't as subtle as you think it is.
The battery life isn't good enough to be able to take an entire movie and, again, the brightly lit screen in a cinema is about as noticeable as someone getting out their phone, something that also has a camera (probably a better camera), has better battery life and is also banned from being used in Cinemas.
Glass is a new form factor but none of the problems that are being ascribed to Glass seem to have anything to do with the design and instead are focused on functions that are shared with a number of other technologies that don't create the same kind of panicked, illogical, luddite ramblings that Glass seems to have led to.
Is it a distraction?
Short answer, no.
The display is not in front of your eye, it is up and to the right. Notifications and alerts do not immediately appear in your vision, obscuring what you are looking at.
When it comes to driving, I simply cannot understand how Glass is deemed to be a dangerous distraction to be banned and in-car GPS/multimedia centres with touchscreens are allowed? The information being sent to the screen is the same in both cases yet the built in screen requires you to look away from the road more, focus on something much further away and something that hasn't been specifically designed to pass over the most amount of information in the quickest and most efficient way.
The issue that Glass is constantly being chided for is ridiculous and more recent developments hightlight just how ridiculous the concern is. Jaguar has just released their concept for the advanced, distractionless car information of the future which puts the information you need onto the windscreen to reduce the amount of time that you need to look away from the road.
Fighter jets have used this idea for years, with a Head Up Display to put essential information right in front of the pilot and the Apache attack helicopter adds an additional monocular display to add to this. Correctly displayed information, with a well designed UX like Glass, reduces the distraction for the driver, reduces the amount of time that they spend not looking at the road and enables many of the essential functions to be accessible via voice command.
While I think the level of distraction is much lower than for a smartphone used as sat-nav or for a built-in or other dedicated navigation system, I can still see areas where the potential for distraction, particularly if the user is trying to read more substantial text through Glass, still exists. However, the concerted effort to simplify the information and the way that it is displayed to the user, reduces the potential for distracted drivers and, although I would love to have access to Glass for an extended test to prove it, I think that it is a far superior system than the current, legal in-car systems.
So what are the problems with it at the moment?
While the product is still a beta product in testing and is not a finished product at the moment, there is one main thing that is really stopping me from buying it at the moment and that's value for money.
This a two part problem. The first is that £1000 is simply too much money and the second is that the hardware is effectively substandard.
At £1000 it is an indulgence, the price of a good work laptop and some change, the price of an off-contract flagship phone and a very expensive tablet. Even compared to the notoriously expensive Apple products, it's the same price as a 13-inch, 256Gb MacBook Air, and that brings us to the second part of the problem.
Although Apple products are very expensive, the hardware feels worth it when you deal with it, with high quality materials, a feeling of solidity and some powerful chips under the hood. Glass feels a little lacking in this regard.
They are nice and light, so that you feel you could wear them all day but you get the sensation that you need to be careful with them. The battery on the ear is connected to the main components by a very thin section and, although the plastics have a good quality feel to them, you still feel that a little bit of flexing might result in a catastrophic failure.
You would have to wear them all the time as well as there is no real way to fold them up like you would with regular glasses so, if you do take them off, I would be concerned that that weak point would have additional pressure placed on while resting on a desk or placed in any bag. Looking at the design, it does seem that a hinge could be added in to fold the arms without many problems, nor would it have to interfere with the hinge or display or Glass. Unless the design was to force people to wear them all the time (beneficial to the beta program) I am a little puzzled by the design decision.
Wearing them all the time brings up a major problem I have though. They aren't waterproof, at least, not officially.
While Robert Scoble might be willing to take his Glass into the shower (and horrify legions of web users in the process) I am concerned both from light rain showers and from sweat.
I sweat fairly heavily and even in the relative calm of the demo, with the sun pouring in (for a while) it got quite warm and I found that when I took Glass off, I had to wipe the inside of the frame to get rid of the sweat that had accumulated. This was at the exact point that the €œon€ button on the inside of the frame is, the button that is kept depressed when you wear Glass. The button is small, unobtrusive and seems to be the perfect way to get what is essentially saltwater into the inside of your £1000 device.
The problem of rain was highlighted as I left the demo, with a light shower turning heavier and persistant as I got soaked on the walk back to the train station, the rain making the €œGlass€ stamp on my arm run. In the theoretical event that I had bought Glass at the event (I didn't and couldn't, it was to show off the device rather than being a retail shop) it could have been comprehensively ruined within about 10 minutes.
I didn't bring a bag or a coat along to the event and without a waterproof travel case, I would have been forced to stick Glass up my T-shirt, bend over and then run to the station, desperately hoping that my £1000 device was still going to be working by the time I got back under cover.
With the vast majority of the planet living where there is rain, sleet, snow, fog, mist, sea spray or just humidity, all electronic devices which are meant to be on you should be waterproof. This is true for a smartphone and it should be especially true with wearables, which aren't meant to be stored in relative safety in a pocket.
The Android Wear devices announced around I/O have worked this out. The LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live are IP67 rated for dust and water resistance, and can safely be immersed in water up to three feet deep. Thus far, the yet to be released Moto 360 watch hasn't had the IP rating announced but I would be very surprised if it didn't meet basic standards.
This means that Google's flagship wearable product is also behind the curve when it comes to features that Google itself seems to be pushing for wearables.
Glass is also behind the curve in a number of other ways. As mentioned earlier, the chipset in Glass is the same Texas Instruments OMAP 4430 chipset with a 1.2GHz dual-core CPU that was used in the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The phone was released in November 2011 and the lack of support for the TI chip has led to it falling off the upgrade list for official Nexus products.
Which makes it strange that this old, unsupported, unoptimised chip is being used in Glass when there are much better, faster, more power efficient chips available. The LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live both use a much newer Snapdragon 400 chip and although this seems a reasonable solution, a custom chipset like that in the Motorola X, with specific €œalways listening€ functions, or the optimised chips that Apple use, would be even better. It would be a chipset designed for the task, rather than simply using the leftover stock of chips that Google had lying around and which could be repurposed to the task.
The camera seems fine and better than the specs would suggest but again, where a 5mp, 720p video camera was more than adequate a couple of years ago, it is decidedly substandard now. The low-cost Moto G uses a camera of that quality as a way to reduce the production costs.
That might be acceptable on a £99 low budget phone, it seems unnecessarily cheap on (this point keeps coming up) a £1000 gadget.
And there is the other elephant in the room - the proper retail version of Glass, which with the launch of new frames from Diane von Furstenberg and the launch of the Explorer version in the UK at the full price, probably won't be released before Christmas at the earliest. The longer the Explorer program goes on, the closer to a retail version it is and the less likely I am to spend £1000 when a better version at a fraction of the price is around the corner.
I've already waited 18 months to try it, I can wait a few more months to buy a version within my price range and with some improvements built in.
What should be in the Retail version?
Waterproofing
This is a given, Glass, like other wearables which are exposed to the elements and in constant contact with skin, should be waterproof.
Not splashproof or €œyou can probably get away with it€ but at least IP67 rated ie protected against water immersion for 30 minutes at a depth of 1 meter.
I need to be able to do things, navigate, run, take pictures, send messages, read notifications, when it's raining as well as when it's nice.
I live in England, why would I want a wearable device that I can only wear about 30% of the time? (being generous)
Updated Hardware
An updated chipset is essential, the OMAP 4430 is slow, old, unsupported and unoptimised for always listening, low-power bluetooth, image processing and low power applications.
It runs at 1Ghz, making the best equivalent device to look at the benchmarks are the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 range, also running 1Ghz OMAP 4430 which produce results of around 480 on the Geekbench 3 multi-core test (Results)
In the Motorola RAZR XT910, the same chip, at a 1.2Ghz clockspeed produces a result of 515 compared with a 1.19Ghz Snapdragon 400 in the Moto G which clocks in at 1116 on the same test.
But the 400 is already in devices and the newly (relatively) announced Snapdragon 410 looks a much better contender. It has the same approximate clock speed but uses a 28nm, quad-core, 64-bit, ARM Cortex A53 based chip which is said to have an extremely power efficient design while being significantly faster than the existing A5/A7 based ranges.
It also has support for a 13Mp primary camera, LTE Cat 4 support and a whole bunch more bells and whistles including 130mW single-core power consumption.
It is expected to be in devices in the second half of 2014, so it would seem to be perfect for a Xmas present of Glass Consumer version.
The camera could do with a bit of work, at least to bring it up to the standards set by GoPro (although it takes very quick pictures and seemed decent) and a new chip would help immeasurably with that too.
The display is fine and although an upgrade in resolution might be nice with some bells and whistles, the current display looks great and it would help the overall power consumption and speed of the device to not have to push more pixels. There is also a question of the form factor. While it would be nice to replace the 640x360 Himax FSC-LCOS Transparent Display with something akin to the Holoeye HED 7200 which has a 1280x720 resolution on a 0.37€ diagonal screen, whether you could get that part in there without significantly changing the design is another matter entirely.
I would love to give an opinion on the battery life but it wasn't something that I could assess during the demo. However, I don't see why 2 years of battery development wouldn't help with energy density somewhat.
Form Factor
Broadly speaking, I quite like the current design, it's light, feels natural on the face, the display is visible easily and wasn't difficult to get positioned although I did have a tendency to lose a corner of the display in my vision.
A slightly more complicated hinge for the display, which includes a couple of millimetres of reach as well as the current rake adjustment to give a better fit for a broader range of people, should be included. It would add little cost, little complication and wouldn't unnecessarily weaken further what is already a potential weak point.
The other thing that needs to be added is a hinge on the sides to allow you to fold the earpieces and put the glasses away, just like every other pair of glasses in the world.
There are an endless range of eyeglasses designs but the one thing that almost every single one has is that you can fold the glasses to make them more convenient, so you can put them in your pocket when you don't need them, when the battery has died, when you are not allowed to wear them (at the cinema or driving).
I understand that the unbroken sweep of the titanium frame would be affected but that would be less of an imposition than having to carry around a bulky bag/case that won't fit into a pocket.
Even at night, you fold your glasses and put them on a nightstand or shelf. You don't leave them open and taking up 4-5 times more space than is necessary. It would even mean that you could make a nice neat charging dock that didn't take up much space.
I can't see an obvious reason other than aesthetics why the frame of Glass isn't hinged, as you can see below, there seems to be an obvious point to add the hinge in without affecting the electronics package at all.
During the short time I was able to play around with Glass, no other obvious form factor improvements suggested themselves but again, I used them for only about 40 minutes.
All of the prescription frames options however seemed strangely designed, with some sitting strangely and all displaying a strong €œhipster€ aesthetic that, while being somewhat fashionable right now is a polarising look that not everyone (myself included) is a fan of.
The other problem with designing the frames to be €œfashionable€ rather than classically elegant, is that fashion changes; rapidly.
Assuming (again) that the device lifespan for the consumer would be approximately 2 years (based on the idea that Glass might be marketed as a phone + wearable package to go along with standard 24 month contract) do you want a pair of glasses that will go out of fashion within that timeframe, or would you prefer something that will still look as good at the end of that time as it did at the beginning.
The current Glass frame designs would mean that I would probably change back to wearing contact lenses, something that would also allow me to enter places where Glass is banned without having to carry a backup pair of glasses. Otherwise I end up with the choice of being able to see but not being able to get in the cinema, or being able to get into the cinema but watching all of that wonderful visual glory in Short-Sighted Blurry Vision„¢
Apps
I didn't get a chance to play with many apps but already, only a few weeks after the announcement, Android Wear has more apps available for the watches than Glass has managed to acquire in nearly 2 years.
I would expect the retail version of Glass to essentially run Android Wear (device restrictions seem to work well enough on the Play Store), allowing Google to pool the resources and attention of the developers who seemed reticent to develop for Glass.
Was it that apps for Glass couldn't be charged for or was it that the high price meant that there was little point in developing for a device with thousands of users rather than millions? (Windows Phone app development seems to have a similar kind of problem). Either way, it seems sensible to take advantage of the momentum that Wear devices have already got and which the Moto 360 seems destined to increase stratospherically.
Price
£1000 is simply too high.
It's too high for the specifications, too high for all but limited distribution and too high for a 2 year old product that is likely to be replaced soon.
I would have taken a lot, lot longer to decide if it were only £500 (but mainly because I'm a fanboy that's been chasing these like Ahab since they were released)
At £300 I would (probably) already own a pair, even if I knew a new version would be released at Xmas.
I expect the retail version to launch at about the same price as a PS4 or Xbox One, £/$4-500. Like the console it is a bit of an indulgence but it is in the ballpark of what people will spend on a tech treat for themselves.
Like buying a new £400 LCD TV despite having bought one just a couple of years ago, or buying a new iPad Air when you already have a iPad Retina, this is around the price that people will make an impulse buy.
If Google brings out a retail version of Glass this Xmas for around £400, I will be busy clicking F5 on the product page when it is released, desperate to claw my way to the front of the queue.
If it's still £1000 (or close) then I will have to sadly wave my Glass dreams goodbye until mass adoption drives the price down to a reasonable level.
Conclusion
Glass is impressive, more impressive than I had expected even after 2 years of being my own hype machine for it.
It's light, easy to use, with a bright clear screen, responsive, easy to use controls and passable battery life.
It's even more impressive if you compare it to the expectations of the technology from before Glass was announced.
Glass is in some ways a victim of it's own abilities, it has reset the expectations of the tech community about what glasses based wearable computing can look like and do. BG (Before Glass) wearable devices of this type had a separate battery, were attached to a separate processing unit with a wire and looked a little like a cross between something an optometrist used and a prop from Red Dwarf.
Even wearable computing pioneer, Steve Mann's device back in 2012 was physically attached to his skull and other devices of the time (which had years or decades of research behind them) used a Pipboy style keyboard on a cuff to control the computer.
Glass has moved the bar but has then stayed still, resulting in a wonderful device that chugging along using the internals of a phone that no longer gets Nexus updates anymore.
The idea is worth £1000.
Some of the apps are worth damn near £1000, they are so polished and just damn wonderful to look at.
But the hardware isn't worth £1000 and I'm not sure it will ever be any more.
It certainly isn't worth more than a Nexus 5, a Nexus 7, a Moto 360 and a few hundred pounds.
In conclusion, I still want Glass but I won't be buying it...yet.
