I wore the most advanced smart glasses for two months — the tech is futuristic, but the look is not

After years of testing the best smart glasses, I’ve grown a thicker skin than others when it comes to wearing obviously tech-looking devices on my face. But even by that standard, the vibes are way off with TCL’s RayNeo X3 Pro AR Smart Glasses.

The good news is that the tech is impressive. The binocular micro-LED displays run nice and bright at up to 6,000 nits and present a nice shared view across both eyes. Google Gemini offers an impressive multi-modal AI bedrock to RayNeo’s intuitive AIOS, which is itself really easy to use.

The app support is, actually, pretty great here, with the likes of TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp forming an in-window perspective without staring down at your phone, and turn-by-turn directions forming a nice HUD so you never look lost.

But…look at them…just look at them. They’re comfortable to wear, a lot smaller than the X2 Pro (and slightly thinner than the Meta Ray-Ban display glasses), but the aesthetics aren’t there.

They still scream “prototype” and are a big indicator that the challenge of making advanced smart glasses look good is going to be a lot harder than we all thought. Maybe Google’s Android XR and the company’s partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monsters are the answer, but TCL’s shown it's a tough pill to swallow.

If you’re brave enough to wear them, this is a glimpse into the future of what smart wearables can truly be. But at $1,099 for the early bird price, and with looks that scream more “Dexter’s Laboratory” than literally any character wearing glasses in “Dexter,” it’s a tough sell.

TCL RayNeo X3 Pro: Cheat Sheet

• What is it? These are display smart glasses — the next generation of merging AR and AI glasses together.
• Who is it for? These are for the serious tech enthusiasts with deep pockets. Those who want the cutting edge, no matter the cost and design.
• What does it cost? Early bird pricing starts at $1,099.
• What do we like? They are lightweight and comfortable to wear, while also being packed to the gills with tech, including mightily impressive micro-LED dual displays, an intuitive OS and Google Gemini for smarter smarts than you can get with the Ray-Ban Metas.
• What don’t we like? Battery life is on the lower end (to be expected), but that downside just pales in comparison to how dramatically unsubtle they look when worn in public.

TCL RayNeo X3 Pro: Specs

TCL RayNeo X3 Pro: The ups

Looking past the awkward optics (we’ll get to that in a bit), putting these on showed me we’re taking a decisive step toward the future of smart glasses I see developing over the next 10 years.

Comfortable wearability

The X2 Pro definitely felt more like a prototype with its gargantuan size and weight really pushing down on the top of your ears.

However, the X3 Pro feels more refined with a smaller, more utilitarian design that mimics a more traditional pair of wayfarers. And in terms of wearability, they are slightly bigger and heavier than the biggest players in the game (currently) in the Meta Ray-Ban Display specs. But with better weight distribution, they feel more comfortable.

Not only that, but they’re much lighter, too, at less than 3 ounces. Pair that with a nice arch around the ears and lovely cushioned nose pads, and you’ve got something that feels comfortable to wear all day long.

But the design is still a problem. The camera in the middle will draw that classic double-take look of confusion you’d get when wearing your standard pair of AR glasses.

Smart glasses the way they should work

Bar a complicated setup process (I’ll get into detail on that in a bit), once you’re off to the races, you see the vision of exactly how smart glasses should work. The dual diffractive micro-LED displays overlay the world around you nicely with information, while still being visible in bright surroundings thanks to that 6,000-nit peak brightness.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking full Jarvis from “Iron Man” here, but the UI is sleek, and the app selection offers the full suite of usability that can replace some of the small essential phone tasks that glasses were set to take.

Tap and scroll on the temple to move over the range of apps available here, from setting to do lists with your voice, AI recording/translation, listening to music, and directing yourself to destinations with a nice, subtle UI.

The OS itself is easy to navigate around either with the touchpad on the glasses or via your phone, and establishing quick tasks is a cinch. There’s even a couple of games that offer a little bit of fun, paired with solid on-device speakers with good clarity in all the tunes I threw at them, and the microphone picks up your voice great in calls.

Then there’s the option to sideload apps. Given these are based on a fork of Android, there is a small app store at the moment, but you could sideload the likes of TikTok onto here too if you wanted to doom scroll on the bus! And that Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chipset is capable of handling these basic tasks without slowing down dramatically.

Using the 12MP camera, you can get shots that are a little on the overly-warm side (fine for social media), but the detail is crispy, and it makes it ideal for quick snaps on-the-go and unlocking some of the great AI features. Speaking of…

Solid AI smarts

Then comes the key to bringing AR glasses intelligence, there’s live AI under the hood here — operating off Google Gemini. What this means is you get Gemini Live, which does serve some good uses when paired with the camera.

Stuck on what to cook one night, I just peered into my fridge, had a back and forth about what I could cook, expanded my options by opening my pantry and spice cupboard to land on jerk chicken, rice and peas.

Of course, there are a lot of other AI niceties you can get too, such as real-time translation of spoken word and real world signs, and audio recording and transcription/summary generation. The helpfulness is clear.

At the moment, this real-time AI assistance doesn’t talk to other apps yet. I can ask it for the best nearby coffee shops, but I’m met with a swift “I can’t do that” when asking to direct me (even though the X3 Pro does do that in the Maps app).

However, this joining up looks set to happen in an upcoming software update, and at the moment, it is useful even in its own silo.

TCL RayNeo X3 Pro: The downs

For all the good things the RayNeo X3 Pro can do, there are two big problems here.

Battery life is a big old “yikes”

From the demos way back at MWC, battery life made me nervous. And in practice, that much is the case. One 15-minute walk with map directions can take the battery down from 100% to 74%. Plus, to control them when out and about, you’ll need to hotspot your phone, which is an additional drain on another device too.

Of course, under super limited use, you can get these to last a few hours on one charge. But if you’ve spent over $1,000 on a pair of smart glasses, you don’t want to feel like you have to ration just how much you can use them.

Well…they’re goofy-looking

For all technology, design is important. For something as visible as glasses, it’s super critical, and while the Wayfarer-esque styling is a little more subtle here, the oversized presence and obvious tech are the biggest pain points plaguing the X3 Pros.

The first time I wore them out to meet my friends at the pub, the reaction was a swift dagger to my self-confidence — from confused double takes to quick snickers. And eventually, my more techie friend, who knows the meme verbiage, said what I feared: “You look like a glasshole.”

I give TCL credit for being able to pack this much gadgetry into something as comfortable as this. But the looks are quite far off where they need to be for widespread adoption.

TCL RayNeo X3 Pro: Verdict

While it’s true that the RayNeo X3 Pro glasses feel a lot less prototypical and more like an actual next step in smart glasses, the looks are hard to get by when taken out of the realm of techie friends and into the general public.

It’s amazing tech, and kudos to TCL for nailing a lot of what I envision display smart glasses doing when paired with AI. But to get there, we have a few too many hurdles for me to recommend this to anyone other than those with bulletproof social confidence — who live on the bleeding edge of gadgetry.

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