Google Glass: Software Review

Limited to voice commands, simple voice gestures, and a relatively small display, Google Glass needs to be simple if it’s going to be useful. Google has stripped down the Android operating system into a beautifully basic experience that’s easy to understand, quick to learn, and a pleasure to use.

The Glass Home Screen

To conserve battery and avoid distraction, the Google Glass display stays off by default, requiring the user to initiate Glass and “wake it up.” This is done in one of two ways:

  1. Tapping the Glass touchpad on the right of the frame
  2. Tiling your head up at a user specified angle

When taking Glass on and off you often accidentally press and/or swipe the touchpad. I haven’t experienced any personal catastrophes, but theoretically this could lead to deleting an important video, sharing a picture with an unwanted contact, or calling an ex-girlfriend. An option in the settings allows for “Head Detection”, which would disable the Glass touch pad when it’s taken off your head, but even that can be a bit wonky.

Nodding your head can be helpful, especially when your hands are full, but this can activate Glass Home at unwanted times, as well. For example, at the bar, every time I took a sip of my beer… Glass Home. Accelerating from a stop in the car… Glass Home. Thankfully, this is a setting you can turn on or off in the options, or you can set your own preferred wake angle in settings from 10 degrees to 40 degrees.

Once you wake glass up, you’ll be greeted with this home screen every time:

The big number is obviously the time and the phrase “ok glass” is what you say to initiate voice commands. Before we let Beetlejuice out of the bag, let’s talk a bit about how to generally navigate Google Glass.

Navigating Google Glass

Think of the Google Glass user interface geometrically and consider it a horizontal timeline. The home screen is where you are right now and you can move right, left, down, and up at any time.

That’s the navigation crash course… I told you it was beautifully basic!

Glass Voice Commands

One thing every first time Glass user (and SNL comedians) like to joke about or attempt is an endless amount of Google Glass voice commands. Ok Glass, fetch me a beverage. Okay Glass, delete this picture. Okay Glass, get me off of work early.

I hate to be the one to tell you, but it doesn’t quite work that way. The only voice commands that currently work are those found on the Glass Home screen after saying, “Okay Glass” or tapping the touch panel to bring up the list.

The full list of options include:

To see these commands in action, read our article on “what you can see and do with Google Glass”.

You can either read your option aloud or swipe and tap to the option you want before voicing further commands. And for the record, yes, if someone is close enough to you while on the voice commands screen, they could say something that initiates a voice command on your Glass. How to solve this problem? Don’t have %#$!#(@ friends like Chris Chavez!

I was blown away by how fast you can speak and Glass still managed to pick up every single word. Since Android introduced voice commands, I’ve always tried to speak slowly and clearly to ensure proper transcription, but with Google Glass you can absolutely zip through them. In fact, when getting directions, I found it was almost TOO fast – read our Google Glass Navigation Review for more on that.

Google Glass Timeline

We already talked a little bit about this above, but the Glass Timeline is your homescreen, an incredibly useful and enjoyable feature of Google Glass. Right at your fingertips is a complete history of your Google Glass activity. You can easily swipe through the chronological history with forward and back swipes, get more information by tapping into a specific card, or initiate new activity.

Google Search

I’d place the type of results you get from performing Google searches on Glass into three categories:

Google Glass hasn’t even hit infancy. In fact, I’m not even sure I’d consider it a newborn. With the Google Glass Explorer Edition, Google will undoubtedly continue to tailor the Google Search experience for the device as time goes on and with their ever-expanding knowledge graph info, Glass’ value will increase dramatically.

Google Now

Forget about search, Google Now anticipates what you want to know and displays the results in advance. On one side of Glass Home you’ve got your history, and on the other is Google Now, accessed with a backwards swipe.

The following features are currently available with Google Now for Glass, but this list will expand over time:

These cards work just like the rest of Glass – with simplicity and ease. For example, tap your Google Now Weather Card and you’re given a 3-day forecast. Tap your Google Now Places Card and you’re given a list of nearby places of potential interest. Tap into a specific place to get even more options, like navigating there by driving, biking, or walking.

The very last card of “Google Now” takes you to the Google Glass settings.

Google Glass Settings

All the way at the back of the Google Now cards you’ll find a settings screen that looks like this:

Within the settings there are a handful of cards/options:

These settings are all fairly straight forward, but as the Glass feature set grows and new ideas and issues emerge, I would expect the list of settings to grow as well.

Google Glassware

Google Glass apps are called Glassware. These represent the promise of Google Glass. Rather than thrusting us into a Google only experience, Glassware will give us access to an ocean of opportunity created by third party developers. Just like your smartphone has access to an obnoxious amount of content, so will Glass.

Right now, Glassware is extremely limited, with the New York Times app serving as the primary example of Glassware. The app is terrible. It inserts breaking news into your timeline history, which is fine, but item after item pile side by side, clogging up your Glass history and making it a disaster to sort through. What’s worse: there is no way to delete a New York Times Card from your timeline. Pretty much all other cards are deletable.



I imagine the bulk of Glassware will work in the following ways:

There isn’t much Glassware out there right now, but it’s of primary importance for the success of Google Glass. Over the next year, much of Google Glass news will come in the way of app and game announcements, demos, beta versions, updates, ideas, concepts, and more. Stay tuned as we’ll be covering this regularly on Phandroid.com.

This is part of our Google Glass Review. For more information, check out the full review, or jump directly to one of the following sections: Introduction, Hardware, Software, Navigation, Calls & Messaging, Camera, Day in the life (1, 2, 3), FAQ, Conclusion.

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