Normal-looking glasses with solid audio and way better battery life is a win for everyone. Karissa Bell for Engadget RATING : 8.5 / 10Pros Lightweight and comfortable Frame styles look more like "normal" glasses Massively improved battery life Cons Action button isn't that useful Privacy concerns are still a thing Meta's audio-only smart glasses couldn't have come at a more opportune time. At a moment when there's increasing backlash against the company's growing lineup of camera-enabled glasses, the Ray-Ban Meta Audio frames ditch the feature most associated with "creep glasses." Instead, as the name implies, the frames are all about making the most of audio.
The result is a pair of glasses that are lighter, more comfortable and have far better battery life than any other glasses from the company. They also look a lot more subtle and are the closest to "normal" glasses we've seen from Meta. New style, better fit Meta has two different frame styles for its $349 audio-only glasses: Burbank, which looks a bit like a thinner Wayfarer, and Clubmaster, an immediately recognizable Ray-Ban design.
I opted for the latter because it comes in a wider variety of colors and I prefer thinner frames in general. From the front, I'm not sure anyone would recognize the glasses as having any tech abilities. My frames did have the transparent arms Meta often uses to display the inner circuitry of the glasses, but it's still relatively subtle.
Karissa Bell for Engadget There isn't a camera or front-facing LED, but the setup is overall similar to Meta's other glasses. The right arm still has a touchpad for controlling volume, answering calls and other functions, and there's a small inward-facing LED for notifications. There's also a tiny action button, which you can use as a dedicated shortcut for certain features.
It might seem like Meta simply stripped down its existing glasses designs, but the company's VP of Wearables, Ming Hua, told me that the company actually had to rebuild the speaker and microphone setup to work on a smaller frame. That work definitely paid off. The audio-only glasses are noticeably slimmer than other models.
They also fit better and are far more comfortable because less of the weight sits toward the front of the frames. At 47 grams, the Clubmaster glasses are only 2 grams lighter than the Ray-Ban Meta Optics frames, but they feel significantly lighter because they put less pressure around my nose. Karissa Bell for Engadget If you've read my past reviews of other Meta-branded glasses, you know I often struggle with getting a good fit.
Most of the frame styles feel like they are meant for faces just a bit wider than my own, and the weight tends to cause them to slip around my face. But the Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses have traditional notepads that actually stay in place. You can also get the tips adjusted by an optician (Meta also provides this service at its retail stores and pop-ups as well), but these actually fit me well out of the box without any tweaks.
I wore them for several long stretches and actually forgot I was wearing smart glasses because they felt so much like my typical shades. No camera, (mostly) the same AILike other recent glasses from Meta, the audio-only frames have 6 mics and open-ear speakers. Music, podcasts and phone calls sounded just as good as my Gen 2 glasses.
One quirk of the audio-only glasses is that the microphones are in slightly different places. There are now two mics on the front of the frames, replacing the ones that were embedded in the nosepads in previous models. The other four are on the arms.
This new placement didn't seem to affect things, though. Friends and family told me I sounded clearer on calls when I was wearing the audio glasses, compared with my second-gen Air Pods Pro. The other major advantage the audio-only glasses have compared with other models is the battery life.
Meta says the frames can go 12 hours on a charge with "mixed use" and up to six hours of continuous aud...
Source: Engadget · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing