First big Google Glass update adds more notifications and a slew of bug fixes

Much like Gmail’s five year-long beta period, expect Google Glass to be a “work in progress” for some time.

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Google today released the first major update for Google Glass after it finally began rolling out to early adopters, Phandroid reports. The “XE5” update includes a bunch of notification updates, as well as some useful features like easier searching from anywhere in the Glass interface and better battery charge estimation.

It’s surprising that Google is only now getting around to adding some of the new features like crash reporting and international dialing. That goes to show that, despite looking like something from the future, Glass is still very much in its early stages.

Expect plenty more updates like this as Google learns more about how people are actually using Glass. Everyone participating in the Google Glass Explorer program are basically guinea pigs before Glass makes its way to the general public.

The new features in the update include:

• Change to sync policy: require power + wifi for background uploads
• Crash reporting
• Incoming G+ notifications (direct shares, comments, +mentions), including ability to comment and +1
• Incoming Hangout notifications
• Transcription of queries & messages is now wicked-fast
• Long-press to search from anywhere in the UI (no longer just from off)
• International number dialing + SMS
• Hop animation on disallowed swipes in the UI
• New On-Head Detection calibration flow
• Show device Serial Number on Device Info card
• More reliable estimation of battery charge remaining
• New recipient-list mosaic

Photo: Project Glass/Google+