These Smart Glasses Are Already Kicking Meta Ray-Bans' Ass
Meta clearly has more competition than ever in the world of smart glasses, and that field of competitors isn't getting any slimmer. The most recent company to join the smart glasses fray is China's Xiaomi, which just unveiled a pair of frames that, if I'm being totally honest here, puts Meta's Ray-Ban glasses to shame—at least on paper.
The first thing I noticed about Xiaomi's AI Glasses, which costs around the same price as Meta's Ray-Ban glasses at $280, is that it does something that I've been wanting for a long time as an owner of Meta's Ray-Ban glasses. According to Xiaomi, its AI Glasses can be used for mobile payments with a combination of the glasses' camera and Alipay, Alibaba's popular mobile payment system. From what I can gather from Xiaomi's press materials, the glasses can scan a QR code and then use the onboard voice assistant as confirmation that you actually want to pay for an item. On the surface, it sounds like you could end up accidentally walking around paying for things, but with a few failsafes—voice activation and verification—I don't think that should be an issue. I don't have the full details on how the feature works, though, so fingers crossed Xiaomi thought this one through—if it did, then it could be incredibly convenient.
Next is something I've also thought about many times while wearing Meta's Ray-Ban glasses, especially when I want to wear them inside—electrochromic lenses. To put that phrase in layman's terms, that means the ability to electrically shift whether the lenses are shaded or transparent. Sure, Ray-Ban smart glasses can be purchased with transition lenses installed, but being able to shift between shaded and transparent manually is kind of awesome, especially if you can fine-adjust the level depending on your eyesight or preference.
And the advantages don't stop there. If this last bit is true—I have my doubts that it is—then Xiaomi's smart glasses are frankly blowing Meta's Ray-Ban glasses out of the water. According to Xiaomi's literature, the AI Glasses have an absurd 45 minutes of continuous video recording. That would be impressive, not just for a pair of smart glasses, but for an iPhone 16 Pro even, which tends to get pretty damn hot when recording video for extended lengths of time. Meta's Ray-Bans, by the way, can record a maximum of three minutes of video in one sitting, which was recently upped from the original max recording length of 90 seconds.
In addition to those three things, Xiaomi's glasses match Meta's Ray-Bans in almost every way and even push the envelope in a few more. There's a 12-megapixel camera, a voice assistant onboard, and a five-mic array for using its voice assistant and taking calls—all three of those things match Meta's Ray-Bans punch for punch. In the battery department, Xiaomi's glasses allegedly roll the ball forward big time, though. While Meta's glasses are only rated for four hours of battery, Xiaomi says its glasses can last for 8.6 hours on a single charge. Again, this is kind of a major claim, so I'm approaching that spec with some skepticism, but if it is true, that makes Meta look silly. Oh, Xiaomi also says the glasses are capable of first-person video calls and livestreaming, too. Sure. Why not?
I have my doubts about Xiaomi's AI Glasses, don't get me wrong, but if they really do what the company says they do, they might easily (on paper, at least) be the best smart glasses out there. They don't crack the code with an augmented display on the lens or anything like that, but they allegedly double the battery life, expand the continuous recording time by 15x Meta's glasses, and include more nice-to-haves like the ability to execute mobile payments or manually transition the lenses in or out of shade mode. Even if these things are total bullshit, I'm starting to think that Meta ought to really up the game here, because Xiaomi's smart glasses are now the only ones I want.
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