Googe Glass, Right Now a ‘Newton’, Will Become the Next iPhone - Study

In a few years' time, so many people might be walking around with smartglasses that you might wonder what all the fuss was about over Google Glass. According to a new study, Google Glass is poised to take over Americans' faces, and a sizable number of them are ready and willing.

The new report, from Forrester Research, an independent technology and market research company, says that 12 percent of the U.S. population is ready to put wearable computing devices on their faces, "if they come from a trusted brand," says CNET, who dug through the report.

The survey was conducted on more than 4,600 American adults in April and found that 21.6 million online consumers, or 12 percent of the population in the U.S., would wear augmented reality glasses if they were available and came from a trusted brand.

While 12 percent doesn't sound exactly ubiquitous, consider that just two years ago, according to the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, Apple's iPhone was in the hands of 10 percent of the U.S. population. Now a quarter of all American adults who own a cellphone own an iPhone.

"Google Glass is a 'when,' not 'if' product," wrote Forrester Research's Sarah Rotman Epps in the summary of the report. "We have no doubt that in time, Glass will be the next iPhone."

But not yet. Epps, a market analyst, compares the current prototype of Google Glass, which has only been released to a few handpicked developers, journalists, and others through Google's "Glass Explorer" program so far, to Apple's Newton.

Developed by Apple Inc. starting way back in 1987, Newton was a line of touchscreen PDAs, or personal digital assistants, and the operating system on which those PDAs ran. Newtons came with a stylus and were used to take notes, write emails, store contacts, and manage to-do lists. Basically, Newton is the ancient ancestor of the iPhone.

Epps notes that the current version of Glass has some problems to work out before it can evolve from being Google's Newton to becoming the new iPhone. The current Google Glass's "short battery life, as well as the limited Mirror application programming interface (API), which restricts app developers' access to the device's native hardware sensors, makes version 1 Glass more of a Newton than an iPhone," writes Epps. "By that, we mean that Glass is extremely compelling but extremely limited in its current form, just as Apple's Newton was."

Luckily for Apple in the 90s, the Newton never prompted letters from U.S. lawmakers and privacy commissioners from half a dozen countries around the world, asking for explanations about the product and privacy assurances, as Glass has. While nearly all of these privacy worries apply equally to smartphones as a general category of devices (and, in fact, Google Glass won't work without being tethered to a smartphone), Google still has to contend with these worries if it's to pass the "trusted brand" part of Forrester's equation.

According to CNET's parsing of the Forrester report, half of the 12 percent of Google Glass's potential instant adopters are young people interested in the smartglasses for its navigation, camera, and other utility-based apps, while the others are professionals who would like the devices to work hands-free.