As you set fort to lay your hand on a new pair of Goolge glasses today, let’s quickly give you the heads up on what to expect from Google’s $1,500 pair of glasses.
Although the device will support KitKat and a couple of new features, including new tools for working with photos easier, Google has also decided to remove the option to do video calls from Glass for the time being.
Google says video calls from Glass didn’t live out to the company’s “high standards.” Only about 10 percent of Glass users currently use them, and because of this, the Glass team has made “the hard decision to remove video calls from Glass until the experience is better.”
It’s unclear when this feature will return, but Google tells Glass users to keep an eye out for video-streaming apps in the MyGlass app library for third-party solutions. Given that video calls from Glass were always one of the device’s marquee features, it does come as quite a surprise that Google would remove this, even if just a few percent of its current users use it.
Is Hangout Really Enough?
As for the photo updates, Google now finally bundles photos together so when you scroll through your timelines, it’s not cluttered by lots of photos, and the photos you take are easier to find. Glass now bundles all your videos, photos and vignettes into a single bundle for each day. If you take a lot of photos on Glass, that’s definitely a major improvement.
Despite losing the video calling feature, Hangouts on Glass are still an option for chats, and with this update, Google now allows users to more easily send photos in Hangout messages.
Other new updates include a voice command menu that’s now sorted by frequency and recency, as well as the ability to more easily send feedback about Glass right from the device.
According to Google, there are a few more features in this update, too, but it hasn’t updated its Glass Journal blog yet. We will update this post with a list of all the new features as Google makes this information available.