Last week, the Internet was all in a tizzy about the latest video out of Google, a concept titled
Project Glass.
It’s this headset that puts a single screen in front of your right eye
and displays information about the environment you’re in. If you haven’t
seen it yet, take a moment to check out the
video.
Some are saying that this idea is genius, while others are saying it's a dumb move and a piece of vaporware. But it does open up a
conversation, particularly in regards to the iPhone: What is the future
of the device?
Extending the Phone Concept
In the past 10 years, cell phones have come a long way. I can remember
really wanting a Motorola Razor, and back then it didn’t have
texting capabilities at all. Today’s iPhone has set the standard for the
mobile phone market, and now almost every one is both “smart” and has a
touchscreen,GPS and speaker phone built in.
But what’s next? There has to be a logical transition between the
current generation iPhone and the next generation of smartphones. Is it
smaller? More compact? Embedded in your body somehow? Project Glass is
one idea, and to me, it’s kind of cool.
Project Glass as a Bluetooth Extension
At first, many thought that Project Glass was a device itself,
and essentially a smartphone replacement. I never thought of it that
way, and it turns out that I’m not the only one. Shawn B. wrote:
"Say Project Glass were a remote control for your
phone. If so, you could surely configure it to only display certain
types of incoming messages, and maybe even only from certain types of
people / networks. In that type of scenario, Glass would be more like a
very advanced, visual version of a Bluetooth headset"
That makes a lot of sense. Some have said that the next step in the
smartphone evolutionary process is related to Bluetooth. Maybe your
watch syncs with your iPhone and displays caller information when the
phone rings. Or maybe you’ve got some kind of always connected headset
that constantly relays information to you as needed. But the headset
with eyepiece hasn’t really come up, because up until this video, it
seemed much more like “that’s Star Trek tech” than anything realistic.
Now, I’m not so sure.
But the reality is I saw this coming and this is still in the making and the question remains will any one buy this?
