Another month goes by without a Google Glass update

Phandroid

Another month goes by without a Google Glass update

As March comes to a close and we collectively prepare ourselves for April Fool’s Day tomorrow, there’s 10′s of thousands of Google Glass Explorers out there with another thought on their mind: “Where’s my Google Glass OTA update?” When the Glass Explorer program first launched, the Glass Team told Explorers that they’d be receiving monthly updates as they tweaked and grew this new platform, even mentioning it at Google IO 2013. As of today, Glass hasn’t been updated since December 17 of last year, nearly 3 and a half months ago.

It’s been  a while…

Back in December, Glass Explorers were told that the XE12 update would include January’s update too. XE12 included Wink to take a picture, a lock screen, additions to Play Music, Hangouts, YouTube, and plenty more. This indeed was a sizable and welcomed update.

Come February though, Explorers were anxious for their promised update. On the last day of February, Glass Team member Teresa updated the official community with a bit of sad, but good news. The sad news, no update was coming in February, the good news, Glass was being updated to Android’s latest release, KitKat. The reason behind the delay was simple. The Glass Team didn’t want to push out buggy software to Explorers, ruining the overall experience. Who wants buggy software? Not I. Google did however give Glass owners a tiny update, adding Google+ Community posting support. So there’s that.

Now, here we are a month later, having gone through all of March without an update to Glass and Explorers are starting to wonder what’s going on. Certainly a bit of frustration is justified, seeing as the price to get Glass is a hefty one at $1,500 and Glass owners want to feel that their purchase wasn’t done in vain.

Everyone likes updates.

It’s like getting something new for free. Besides making us excited, updates show that the platform is moving forward and progressing. Watching the platform progress is very satisfying, because Explorers are participating in an entirely new technological space. That said, in the grand scheme of things, Glass Explorers are going to eventually get a more polished and better product. Just be patient. If Explorers are getting bored with Glass, there’s plenty of new Glassware, both official and unofficial to try.

Brace yourselves. KitKat is coming.

Besides the OTA update delay due to the KitKat upgrade, Google most likely has some surprises up their sleeve to enhance the functionality of Glass. Google mentioned that developers would love what they have in store for the impending update. Like what? Who knows?

A few months back, Robert Scoble took to Google+ to rant about Glass and features he’d like to see coming to the platform. From his list, I’d personally love to see better photo management and more context. For example, right now you have to wait until you can plug Glass in for photos to begin uploading. While we don’t want photos uploading all of the time due to battery life, it would be nice to have photos uploaded on case by case basis if they were needed sooner than later. I’d also like to see Glass become more contexually aware. Scoble mentioned that while on stage, he shouldn’t get Tweet’s dinging in his ear. Glass should know that he’s in a meeting, from his Google Calendar, and disable certain services temporarily. Taking the contextual idea a bit further, it would be helpful if all pictures, videos, timeline cards, etc., were all bundled together for easier viewing or just for the sake of organization after an event or meeting ended.

Hold tight fellow Glass Explorers. I’m sure the wait will be worth it.

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