---

Google Glass is an attempt to bring smart eyewear to the masses.

Google is aiming for an early to mid-2014 debut of the gadget to the general public. Despite the clunkiness and awkwardness of the early beta version of Glass, we think computerized glasses will become a mainstream product.

We at BI Intelligence expect unit sales of Glass to climb sharply in the next few years, to 21 million units in annual sales by year-end 2018. At $500 per unit, this equates to a $10.5 billion annual market opportunity. We believe this to be the most likely size, but we provide high, mid and low-range sales estimates that could result develop based on a number of factors.

---

---

Earlier today, our friend Matija sent us some photos of Samsung's upcoming rugged counterpart to the Galaxy S4 Android smartphone. He got his hands on the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active and in addition to those photos, he shot a short video of the device. This is the Samsung GT-I9505, and he tells us it has a dual core Snapdragon S4 Plus CPU and an 8MP rear camera, but the rest of the specs are the same as the non-rugged GS4.

---

---

Google Glass is still in its infancy and has a few kinks to work out, but the potential for Glass in society is astronomical.

Some "Glass Explorers" — developers, basically —over at digital creative agency Playground Inc came up with some conceptual use-cases for Glass should the platform fully mature.

Some of what Playground envisions jibes with some of the apps Google employees would like to see run on Glass. But in other cases, Playground takes Glass to a whole other level.

---

---

Perhaps no group has earned a borderline obscene pejorative as quickly as the wearers of Google Glass. I mean, the product, not due for release until early next year, is seen in the wild today only on the few thousand who are its early testers. And yet we already have the term "glasshole." Google Glass has also been banned ahead of its release. This all seems to stem from the belief, voiced by writers such as Jason Perlow, that Google Glass is evil, since "it's a 'stealth' recording device."

My advice to anyone freaking out over Glass: Get over it.

Sure, there is something unsettling about the evolution of Glass. Eventually, you are going to have to look really closely to tell whether a pair of eyeglasses is computerized. And there's no question that Glass can be used in socially unacceptable ways. But personally, I'm a lot more bothered by the constant cracking of websites holding personal information than I am by the idea that someone could record me in the restroom.
More by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

No question: Glass is going to change how we think about privacy in public spaces. But such rethinking has already been necessary for years. Smartphones required it. For that matter, so did the invention of the camera.

---

---

Today at Google I/O the company held a session entitled "Voiding your Warranty" where employees demonstrated how to root Google Glass and install Ubuntu on it. What you're seeing above is a screenshot from a laptop running a terminal window on top and showing the screencast output from Glass on the bottom -- here running the standard Android launcher instead of the familiar cards interface. The steps involve pushing some APKs (Launcher, Settings and Notepad) to the device using adb, then pairing Glass with a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. After this, it's possible to unlock the bootloader with fastboot and flash a new boot image to gain root access. From there you have full access to Glass -- just like that! Running Ubuntu requires a couple more apps to be installed, namely Android Terminal Emulator and Complete Linux Installer. The latter lets you download and boot your favorite linux distro (Ubuntu, in this case). You're then able to use SSH or VNC to access Ubuntu running right on Glass.

---

---

We test every Google Glass app so you don't have to

Google Glass isn’t ready for prime time. Even Google knows this, which is why it hasn't shipped to the masses yet. Instead, Google floated a few units to “Explorers,” glorified guinea pigs who can enjoy the joys and trials of this cuttingest edge of cutting edge technologies. But nascent or not, Glass exists, and it works. Or at least it "works." Developers are still getting their feet wet, high-profile apps like Twitter and Facebook feel more like experiments than finished products, and bugs aren’t the exception, they’re the rule. But, you know, the thing turns on, and hears you say "Okay, Glass," and eagerly awaits your next command. Beyond the home screen, it’s up to Glass Explorers to wade through the good apps, the bad apps, and the broken apps, and we're right there with them. We went exploring, and this is what Glass can do; right here, right now.

And for those of you without Glass, hopefully we can help you live vicariously through our misadventures and humble GIF illustrations. Glass is a strange beast, and it can take a while to get used to and understand what it’s trying to do. Maybe we’ll make you jealous, or maybe you’ll decide Glass is a worthless piece of trash. Either way, we hope we can shed light on the mystery, the wonder, and the social awkwardness that is Glass.

We’ll be updating this list as new apps come out, and old apps are updated or made obsolete, so keep checking back. And if you see an app we haven’t covered yet, make sure to let us know!

---

---

Google Glass (styled as "Google GLΛSS") is a wearable computer with a head-mounted display (HMD) that is being developed by Google in the Project Glass research and development project, with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer. Google Glass displays information in a smartphone-like hands-free format, that can interact with the Internet via natural language voice commands. While the frames do not currently have lenses fitted to them, Google is considering partnering with sunglass retailers such as Ray-Ban or Warby Parker, and may also open retail stores to allow customers to try on the device. The Explorer Edition cannot be used by people who wear prescription glasses, but Google has confirmed that Glass will eventually work with frames and lenses that match the wearer's prescription; the glasses will be modular and therefore possibly attachable to normal prescription glasses.

---

---

At a panel in San Francisco, Google talked about making Android better.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Although Google's keynote at the I/O conference this week focused heavily on the APIs and behind-the-scenes development of the Android operating system, it looks like there's a lot more in store. This idea was especially apparent in a panel discussion today involving eleven members of the Android development team. The team sat for a forty-minute question and answer session, and while they dodged most inquiries about forthcoming features for Android, they did offer a bit of insight into what the future of Android might look like, what developers could do to help further the platform, and what they’ve learned from their journey thus far.

The conversation began with a question relating to whether or not the Android team would have done anything differently from the beginning. Senior Android Engineer Dianne Hackborn said the team "should have had more control over applications. A big example is the whole settings provider, where we just let applications go and write to it... it was a simple thing that we shouldn’t have done." Ficus Kirkpatrick, one of the founding members of the Android team and the current lead for the Google Play Store team, added that “you’re never going to get everything right the first time. I don’t really regret any of the mistakes we’ve made. I think getting things out there at the speed we did…was the most important thing.”

The team also briefly touched on fragmentation and how they’re working to combat the issue—it was even referred to as the “F” word. "This is something we think about a lot,” said Dave Burke, engineering director of the Android platform. He explained that many silicon vendors take the open source code, break it apart, and create their own Board Support Packages (BSPs) to make their hardware compatible with the software. To streamline the process, the Android team made the code for the platform more layered, so if a vendor needs to make changes, they have a clean abstraction layer to do so without affecting the entire operating system.

---

---

Many free software fans, if they were like me, breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Android operating system hit the market. Before receiving my first smartphone (a Samsung Blackjack running Windows Mobile 5.5, I believe, that I had to update to through a torturous combination of installing Windows XP on a partition, installing the phone drivers, then running an update program), I was a steadfast "PDA-and-cell" guy who proudly carried both devices on my belt like a pair of six-shooters. But that Blackjack showed me how nice it is to carry one device, and since receiving my first Android device (an original Droid I still use to this day), I can't imagine using a device with another mobile OS. Linux kernel, Java-based apps—these are all right up my alley.

But, like many great consumer Linux products (I'm talking to you, Sharp Zaurus), manufacturers assume in nearly every case that your "other" computer will run Windows. Now, it's easy enough to install Windows either on a separate partition to dual-boot or in a VM to run within Linux. But this is a bit like killing the proverbial fly with a bazooka. Web-based applications and "the cloud" alleviate some of these difficulties, yet it's still not an "out-of-the-box-after-a-quick-install-from-CD" process like it is for Windows users.

The good news is, with the installation or configuration of a few programs, it's pretty easy to get your Android device (all the steps in this article are equally applicable to phones and tablets unless stated otherwise) to play nice with your Linux boxen. In this article, I focus on files and a few approaches for making sure you always have an up-to-date copy of that spreadsheet or source file on your mobile device.

---

---

Google covered a lot of ground in its three-and-a-half-hour opening keynote at Google I/O yesterday, but one thing it didn't announce was the oft-rumored next version of Android. However, persistent rumors insist that the elusive Android 4.3 is still coming next month—if that's true, why not announce it at I/O in front of all of your most enthusiastic developers?

The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem.

Consider the full breadth of yesterday's Android-related improvements: you've got an update to the Android version of Google Maps, due this summer, that incorporates some of the features of the iOS version and the new desktop version. There's a WebGL-capable version of Chrome for Android and an entirely new gaming API. A shotgun blast of improvements are coming to the Google Play Services APIs. And that's to say nothing of the products that affect Google's services across all supported platforms: Google Play Music All Access (say that five times fast), Hangouts, and Search improvements.

In iOS, most of these changes would be worthy of a point update, if not a major version update. With few exceptions, making major changes to any of the core first-party iOS apps requires an iOS update. This method works for iOS since all supported iOS devices get their updates directly from Apple on the same day (device-specific updates like iOS 6.1.4 notwithstanding).

This is not true of Android. Here, we've seen apps like Gmail and services like those provided by Google Play gradually decouple from the rest of the OS. This makes it possible for Google to provide major front-facing updates without actually relying on its notoriously unreliable partners to incrementally up the Android version number on their devices. Many of the new things announced yesterday are coming to your Android device whether you're running a Nexus 4 or a Galaxy S 4 or a Sony Xperia ZL or an HTC Thunderbolt.

---