(Credit: Eric Zeman)
BARCELONA—If you've tried on every iteration of smart glasses shown off at trade shows over the last few years, as I have, you'd be right to feel somewhat pessimistic about the device category. If anything has been consistent in what I've seen, it's clunky hardware, kludgy software, and performance that always falls flat. TCL's latest pair, the RayNeo X3 Pro, erases those bad memories and has me believing that this nascent category may actually take off.
The X3 Pro is an upgraded version of the X3. According to TCL, the major difference is that the Pro model has the "world’s smallest light engine" and an "AI-enhanced design." They are very much like the Meta Ray-Ban, but the X3 Pro has a phenomenal full-color display.
The glasses look just as dorky as every other set of smart specs, but they feel lightweight and comfortable at less than 3 ounces. TCL used better plastics and you can tell. Moreover, the stereo speakers produced loud, clean sound and successfully directed it to my ears.
The displays are micro-LED waveguides that pump out a bright 2,500 nits each. I liked the position of the display in my field of view. It was high enough to see while not obstructing my surroundings. You control the user interface by tapping and swiping the right temple. The controls worked well, and I learned the core UI fairly quickly. Basic tools allow you to take photos or videos, listen to music, or navigate with maps.
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(Credit: Eric Zeman)And yes, they have AI. One of the features I got to test was the AI Translation tool. One of TCL's representatives spoke to me in Chinese. Her words appeared on the display in their Han characters. The glasses do have to communicate with your smartphone, and I waited a moment for the cloud to translate the Chinese to English. What was cool was that it showed both the original Chinese and English together once the translation was completed.
The RayNeo X3 Pros are powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chipset, which handles multimodal AI and AR features. The processor is responsive enough to make the glasses feel like they can succeed.
TCL says the glasses will hit the market in the middle of the year but it hasn't yet released pricing details. I look forward to giving them a full review in the future.