There are a few different types of smart glasses that combine to form a slightly confusing market for intelligent specs.
First, there is Google’s Glass smart-glasses that gives you a heads-up display within your eye-line, provide you with visual notifications and let you pull up things like maps while you’re walking about. They are certainly very smart but are incredibly expensive (an enterprise version is currently available for US$1,000).
Then there are Snap Inc’s take on smart glasses. It puts two cameras near your temples that will take short videos and images, then shares it with your phone to – you guessed it – make it easy to share point-of-view shots with your Snapchat audience.
Then there is the last category – which are smart sonic specs. They connect to your phone via Bluetooth and give you access to your phone’s smart assistant, provide voice commands and prompts, and let you listen to music and podcasts via built-in speakers in the ears.
Both Huawei x Gentle Monster’s latest glasses and Bose’s Frames are part of the latter category, which has become by far the easiest and most wallet-friendly way to get a pair of smart-glasses on your noggin.
Both models are rather similar, with built-in speakers near the temple. The real change here is in how they look and how they perform.
Check out the video below to find out which is best:
For our money, if you are out to pick up a pair of smart-glasses to listen to audio, then the one with the best speakers should rightly be the one you choose. That accolade would go to the Bose Frames.
On the other hand, many people buy sunglasses for style (after all, in somewhere like the Middle East you wear a pair pretty much all the time), and the Gentle Monster branded Huawei’s certainly look the best.
Which smart-glass is right for you will no doubt come down to which is a bigger priority for you. What we can say for certain, is that these won’t be the last two pairs of smart glasses we will see in 2020 – and we’re pretty excited about that.
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