New Google Glass Update Adds Several New Features and Enhancements

Jeff Weisbein -

Get excited Glass Explorers! Phandroid reports that Google is rolling out a new update to Glass today.  The Google Glass update, also known as the “XE5″ update, includes a bunch of notification updates, as well as some useful features like easier searching in the Glass interface, and better battery charge estimation.  In order to get the update (which takes a few minutes to complete), you need to plug in your Glass to the charger and then the headset should take care of the rest.

One thing I noticed is how some of these new features in the update are pretty basic, which just goes to show you how early we are in the life of Google Glass.  You can find all of the new features in the Google Glass XE5 update below.

New features in XE5

  • Change to sync policy: require power + wifi for background uploads
  • Crash reporting
  • Incoming G+ notifications (direct shares, comments, +mentions), including ability to comment and +1
  • Incoming Hangout notifications
  • Transcription of queries & messages is now wicked-fast
  • Long-press to search from anywhere in the UI (no longer just from off)
  • International number dialing + SMS
  • Hop animation on disallowed swipes in the UI
  • New On-Head Detection calibration flow
  • Show device Serial Number on Device Info card
  • More reliable estimation of battery charge remaining
  • New recipient-list mosaic