Google finally got around in publishing Google Glass specs in the middle of this month, but despite clearing up the vast majority of the technical details, two key elements remained undisclosed until now. As reported earlier, the hackers have been out in force these past few hours and have managed to root Google Glass, and the joint efforts of both Jay Lee and Liam McLoughlin have seen details of the CPU and RAM finally revealed. Full details on these two key components can be found after the break!
With McLoughlin having already revealed via Twitter that there is "fun to be had" with Glass in terms of rooting and hacking, he and Lee’s work in finding Glass’s USB debugging setting and hooking it up to ADB also uncovered some key specifications pertaining to the operating system, CPU and RAM.
Glass will run on Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, feature a dual-core OMAP 4430 CPU, while also packing arbitrary 682MB of RAM. Of course, specifics on the clock speed would have been nice, but considering how much information the hackers seem to be siphoning out just now, we’ll certainly take what we can get. Lee also adds that Kernel messages seem to indicate that actual RAM may well sit at the 1GB mark, with the 682MB figure perhaps being the result of some memory dedicating itself to the on-board hardware.
Android users accustomed to high-spec releases may be somewhat disappointed with these figures, but one has to consider that Glass is, at least for the time being, a supplement to the smartphone as opposed to an outright replacement. With a companion app already available for Android, it will be the handset that does much of the leg-work while Glass seeks to enhance the general user experience where applicable.
Hopefully, Google will chime in over the next few days and update its specs lists to confirm these rather significant details one way or the other, but the amount of RAM or CPU capability is certainly not the end-all, be-all here.
The news of Glass’ apparent ease of manipulation is the real winner of Lee / McLoughlin’s current endeavors, and one has to hope the breakthroughs continue to be made in the run-up to the official public release of Glass. Besides, these current developer models may well be different in spec to those eventually rolled out, so getting hung up about RAM and CPU is, in my opinion, more than a tad futile at this point.
Thoughts?
(Source: Google+)
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