XE17.3 Officially Rolling Out, Factory Image, OTA Update File & Rooted Boot Available

Google has started rolling out the XE17.3 update we’ve been telling you about and it comes with the great new feature called Notification Glance.

Notification Glance is still marked as experimental, but it seems to be working just great, as we haven’t had any problems with it yet. If you didn’t find out about it yet, let me tell you briefly how it works. Once you activate and calibrate the feature, your prism will turn on if you look at it after you hear the notifications sound and you will see directly that notification.

This makes it much easier to read notifications and it doesn’t need any kind of interaction from your side, except of looking at the prism.

We expect Google to introduce a way to unlock Glass directly by looking at the prism too, but it might drain battery too fast if it watched you all the time. However if Google doesn’t decide to implement the feature, we expect developers to start working on it and it could be available soon for rooted devices.

Along with the official release of XE17.3, Google has also released the factory image, OTA update file and pre-rooted bootloader. Follow the previous links to download them if you’re in need of any of them. If you haven’t received the update yet, you can install it manually.

We are still curious why Google named this update XE17.3, considering that it’s been released in June, which is the 18th month since Glass was initially released. Based on previous version numbers, it should have been called XE18. It’s either that Google is going to change this numbering scheme or they wanted to release it in May and it wasn’t ready, so they didn’t change the number anymore.

Unfortunately XE17.3 doesn’t seem to improve anything else and the bugs that came with Android 4.4 KitKat are still present. Both us at Google Glass Geeks and a lot of other people are still experiencing bugs like the white screen of death, boot loops, “homescreen crashed”, or “camera crashed”. Hopefully Google will focus on improving Glass by fixing bugs instead of adding new features, because the unlucky ones don’t really care about new stuff if they can’t use their Glass.