Google Glass is, as some would say, the “next big thing”. Oops, I hope Samsung doesn’t sue me for saying that. But it’s true. For a while, the smartphone was the next big thing, and now we’re turning to wearables like Google Glass, Pebble and even the Jawbone Up and the Fitbits. On Monday, the creator of Glass, Babak Parviz told a conference that Glass would gain the ability to run local apps that from the device itself. Parviz was speaking at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University on Monday. He spoke about the evolution of Glass and how it’s packing more computing power into progressively smaller former factors. Which we’ve seen in smartphones for a while. In fact, I’d say that some smartphones have faster processors than your laptop or desktop. Of course, that depends on how old your computer is.
We’ve seen many third-party Glass apps take shape already, The New York Times has theirs, Twitter, Facebook and many others. “We still have a lot of data centers, a lot of computers, a lot of smartphones, and a lot of notebooks,” Parviz Said. “So even though these new platforms appear, the previous platforms don’t totally disappear.”
Right now all the services on Glass run in the cloud. “In the next generation of the platform, we may allow people to run things from here,” he said as he was gesturing to the Glass he was wearing.
Parviz doesn’t expect Glass to have it’s own cellular connection like 3G and 4G tablets do. But you will be able to tether from your phone. The major reason being battery life. Already, Glass is pretty bad with battery life. Although I’m expecting that to change when version two hits, or even with a software update. But adding a cellular radio to Glass would greatly impact the battery life. You can see how much cellular radio’s use if you use your phone for a cycle on cellular data, then do another cycle with airplane mode on and wifi on. It’s a huge difference. Which is expected, since your phone won’t be looking for signal all the time. It’s the same with Glass.