When Google started to ship the first batch of Google Glass spectacles to developers it gave us an outline of the technical specifications. Some of the specs were put into everyday workaday-folk terms such as the resolution of the display; “the equivalent of a 25 inch high definition screen from eight feet away”, also the battery offered “one day of typical use”. More precise specs were delivered about the connectivity “Wi-Fi - 802.11b/g, Bluetooth”, the camera “5MP photo and 720p video capability” and the storage on offer “12 GB of usable memory, synced with Google cloud”. However tech specs that HEXUS users like to know were missing, such as processor, RAM and OS. Now we have that information thanks to Google Glass Explorer Jay Lee.
Lee found the USB debugging setting for his Google Glasses and got some details about what makes them tick. His findings are below:
- It's running Android 4.0.4 - Ice Cream Sandwich - just as Larry Page said
- It's an OMAP 4430 CPU - Dual Core? - Having trouble finding exact mhz
- There's 682mb of RAM (678052kb reported in /proc/meminfo). Kernel messages lead me to believe it's actually 1gb but some is being used for other hardware purposes(?)
There’s nothing surprising about that hardware, and as Lee says “the experience is more important than the hardware specs”. He also sounds pretty enthusiastic about the product “the experience is pretty incredible!”
Robert Scoble’s Google Glass review
Luckily, for those of us interested in the new experience offered by Google Glass, there is a two week review of the product that has just been published this weekend. Mr Scoble is startup liaison officer at Rackspace “the Open Cloud Computing Company”, a self-confessed geek who grew up in Silicon Valley (he even wears his Google Glasses in the shower).
After reading Scoble’s review of Google Glass you can be sure he loves this new wearable tech product. After two weeks of using the glasses he proclaims “I will never live a day of my life from now on without it (or a competitor). It's that significant.” He also found them “much more social” to use than a mobile phone.
His particular favourite features were the accurate speech recognition for commands and the camera. The camera is always ready to “capture moments”; Scoble says that in less than a second from thinking about taking a photo he can take it. Trying to get his smartphone out and do the same thing took between 6 and 12 seconds, he said.
Pricing
We learned that the Google Glass Explorer edition cost $1,500 to developers but when the specs are mass produced Scoble reckons that the bill of materials could mean the specs cost just around $200 per pair. In his informal survey of attendees, to several of his presentations, he found that at a projected $500 price tag a few people would buy into Google Glass but at $200 “literally every hand went up”. Perhaps initially the mass produced product will be priced somewhere between those two sums.
