There are a lot of hurdles to clear before smart glasses go fully mainstream, but one of the biggest is battery life. If you’re spending upwards of $500 on a gadget (one that’s more of an accessory than a full-blown computer), you’re going to want to wear it all day. You will not, however, want to wear a device with a battery that’s actually big and heavy enough to last all day.
Alibaba, for its part in the smart glasses conversation, has devised its own solution to that problem: swappable batteries. Its new Quark AI Glasses S1, which are now available on all of China’s major e-commerce platforms, do something I’ve yet to see in a pair of smart glasses by including easily interchangeable rechargeable batteries. With an additional battery pack, Alibaba promises up to 24 hours of use with the Quark AI Glasses S1, which equates to about 12 hours per pack, a figure that’s already pretty impressive. They are not, however, promising that you will both remember to bring your extra battery or that you’ll remember to charge it, though. For reference, the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 AI glasses offer a max of 8 hours on a single charge.
Alibaba’s design is a simple solution to all-day battery life on a pair of smart glasses. It may not be the ideal one, but for now it may be the only way to really get there without weighing your face down. While Meta has done a good job of improving battery life in its AI smart glasses generation over generation, batteries are a finite thing, and without some kind of technological breakthrough in battery chemistry, you can only cram so much juice into a single cell. The fact is (other than a swappable battery), making the battery life longer means making smart glasses heavier, and that’s not a move most purveyors of smart glasses will want to make.
Outside of a swappable battery, the Quark AI Glasses S1 also have a micro OLED display in each lens and cameras for capturing photos and videos in 3K. Another interesting feature in the S1 is that the smart glasses have what sounds like AI upscaling to 4K. Alibaba says that the Quark AI Glasses S1 have “AI-enhanced 4K output,” though they record natively in 3K.
The S1 have most of the features you would expect in a pair of smart glasses, too, including a voice assistant, computer vision, translation, turn-by-turn navigation, transcription, reminders, a teleprompter, and “context-aware” search that can tell you stuff like where the nearest cafe is. They’ll also be integrated with all of Alibaba’s other services, which should make for a pretty smooth experience for streaming music, navigation, and even shopping.
If you’re not into smart glasses with a built-in display, Alibaba is also offering a non-display version called the G1, which has all the same hardware but for a lower price. The S1, by the way, are undercutting competitors like Meta Ray-Ban Display by quite a bit in the price department. They debut at ¥3,799 (about $537), while the G1 will cost ¥1,899 (about $268), comparable to Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses.
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