Yesterday, Google began rolling out the first OTA (over the air) update for the Glass Explorer Edition, dubbed XE5. (Glass shipped running XE4.) This shouldn’t be surprising at all. Google has said from the beginning that Glass would receive monthly updates, during the Explorer program while they continually improve the Glass experience. Seeing as Glass is pretty battery conscious, to get started, you’ll have to plug your Glass into your computer or your charger to begin the update process.

Note: If you’re using Head-On detection or Winky, the application that lets you wink to take a photo, you’ll need to re-calibrate each of these after you apply the update.

What’s new in the Glass XE5 OTA Update?

Change to sync policy: require power + wifi for background uploads

Crash reporting

Incoming G+ notifications (direct shares, comments, +mentions), including the 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 the Device Info card

More reliable estimation of battery charge remaining

New recipient-list mosaic

If you’re big into Google+ (why aren’t you?), you’ll love this update as it adds much needed Google+ integration for notifications and Hangouts. As you can see below, the page corner is turned up because Jake replied, making this a conversation which can be viewed on Glass.

If you aren’t lucky enough to have received Glass yet, there’s still a way to tinker and look under the hood thanks to system dumps. We’ve been lucky enough to have a private system dump of the XE4 edition of Glass for a while now and it’s proved to be a lot of fun. The guys over at Android Police have posted the updated XE5 version for your downloading pleasure. If you like to tinker with Android, we suggest you take a look.

Have you noticed any other changes with Glass XE5? Let us know.