Huawei’s first pair of smart glasses with a camera are official, and as we suspected, they’re pretty similar to the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses. Features include a 12-megapixel camera for POV video and photos, translation, and a voice assistant—sounds familiar, right? Even though it’s most of the same stuff we’ve seen before, there is one difference that gives Huawei’s glasses an edge: the battery.
Huawei’s first camera-equipped smart glasses apparently get nine hours of battery life with continuous music playback, which is significantly more than the maximum amount of battery life advertised by Meta for its Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 smart glasses. Meta says its Gen 2 glasses get eight hours for general/intermittent use, but that figure drops to about five hours for playing music continuously. How exactly Huawei gets almost twice the battery life and whether it holds up under real-life testing remains to be seen, but it’s impressive on paper.
One figure that is slightly less impressive than you might initially think is the weight. According to Huawei, its smart glasses weigh just 35g, which is nearly 20g lighter than the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses Gen 2 that clock in at 50 to 53g depending on the frame size. That caught my attention immediately, but as it turns out, that’s the weight without factoring in the lenses, which… is kind of b*llshit. Call me skeptical, but I somehow doubt people are going to be walking around with lensless smart glasses.
With the lenses factored in, the lightest model of Huawei’s AI glasses weigh 47g, which is still lighter than Meta’s Ray-Bans, but not by much. It’s hard to say where the weight reduction comes from exactly, but Huawei is using titanium in its smart glasses, so that could be a factor. There’s one style with a titanium rim around the lenses (the lightest one), and Huawei says it’s also using a titanium hinge, which is meant to make them more stable than competitors.
Either way, Huawei’s first camera-equipped smart glasses will be comparable to the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses in terms of cost, with an MSRP of 2,499 yuan (about $367). Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 AI glasses start at about $379.
