There are a lot of questions about smart glasses and what they can/should be, but one of the biggest questions isn’t actually about the glasses; it’s about your phone—namely, whether the two gadgets should be inextricably married. Unsurprisingly, some entrants in the field are saying, “Nope, absolutely not.”
For example, TCL, which makes AR glasses like the RayNeo X3 Pro, recently took the wraps off a version of its glasses that would come with a built-in e-sim like the one you probably use on your phone right now. That e-SIM, according to the company, would enable 4G connectivity. To be clear, those glasses are just a concept for now, but they say a lot about where smart glasses could be headed.
As ascendant as the category of smart glasses has been, they are still, in a lot of ways, an accessory for your phone. While some glasses have screens, the capability to initiate calls and texts, and even apps for transcription, YouTube, and other phone-like stuff, almost all of the heavy lifting is still happening off-device. It’s through your phone’s internet connection, not on the glasses.
That’s a small difference in some ways, but it also works subtly to make you feel like smart glasses aren’t really their own thing; you still can’t just grab your glasses when you leave the house and use them as you would any true standalone gadget. That’s fine for some, but also probably not ideal for companies trying to sell a pair of glasses for upwards of $800 (looking at you, Meta), or even as steep as $1,000+.
Whether that experiment will work is anyone’s guess. It remains to be seen what the preferred definition of smart glasses even is. Some of them have screens, and some of them do not. Some of them are more focused on AI, while others care more about audio. Some of them want to act like a whole-ass XR computing platform on your face, while others aim to deliver a lighter, lower-footprint computing experience with discreet notifications and “heads-up displays” that are tucked away in your peripheral vision. And some of them, apparently, want to wholly or partially replace your phone.
We’ve seen how that goes in the past for AI gadgets like Humane and its Ai Pin, and the results are (checks notes), not great. I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I’d wager that this year smart glasses will shoot for your phone and, if they’re lucky, land somewhere closer to an Apple Watch.
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