Nobody could have predicted the turbulent state that console gaming is in right now.
Five years ago, Sony and Microsoft both launched next-gen consoles with very similar PC-based architectures. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X (and its less-powerful sibling, the Series S) promised even bigger and more realistic gaming experiences with near PC-quality graphics and responsiveness. We were told that ray tracing—the recreation of realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows in games—would be worth spending $500 for a new box to plug into our 4K TVs.
On the fifth birthday of both consoles, I can tell you we were sold a lie. Jaw-dropping as ray tracing is, few games even support the graphics enhancement. Out of the more than 1,050 games in the PS5’s library, only 60-something games support ray tracing—that’s a measly 6%. As disappointing as that is, the PS5 has emerged as the winner against the Xbox Series X, outselling Microsoft’s game console by a huge margin. As of November 2025, the PS5’s crossed 84 million units shipped globally since 2020, versus the estimated 30 million that the Xbox Series X/S in the same amount of time.
There’s no telling what will happen in the future, but looking back at the past five years of PS5, it’s clear that Sony did good by gamers. Really f*cking good, for the most part.
I’ll admit that when I first saw the PS5, I was not into its curved panels or its massive size. Consoles are supposed to get smaller and more powerful, not larger—shrinkage is an easy and visible marker of technological progress. The original Xbox was disliked (especially in Japan) because it was such a behemoth. But it seems the PS5 design was just right, at least compared to the Xbox Series X, which is literally just a plain-looking black box. So out of the gate, Sony shipped hardware that looked like it was from the future—people really love gadgets that look materially new and different.
As the games (and exclusives like Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Final Fantasy VII: Remake) rolled in, it became more certain to me that the PS5 was the better hardware for the long run. Though my launch-day PS5 only had 825GB of built-in SSD storage, it could easily be expanded with a standard M.2 NVMe SSD. The Xbox Series X has a proprietary storage expansion slot on the back, but for many years, only Seagate sold them, and they were really expensive. Sony chose the less evil path, and gamers like me appreciate that openness.
Even better than an affordable way to add storage to install the ballooning size of games were two hardware features I didn’t think would leave any long-lasting impression on me: the adaptive triggers in the DualSense controller and the “Tempest 3D audio.” Adaptive triggers provide more nuanced haptic feedback, like the ability to feel the resistance of a car gear pedal in Gran Turismo 7, the tension when pulling back a bow in Horizon: Forbidden West or switching a weapon in Resident Evil Village, or even the different surface materials in Astro Bot. Adaptive triggers add another layer of sensory immersion. Tempest 3D audio is less known, but almost every PS5 game supports it. Using a compatible headset, you can hear subtle sound effects like footsteps, gunfire, and rain (to name a few) coming from different directions. It works so well and is so underrated, but it really heightens things in the thick of a game. I never used a gaming headset with my consoles before, but on PS5, I almost always do.
The evolving nature of gaming also means it’s not enough for Sony (or anybody) to launch a console and just get as many games on it as possible. Those days are long gone. So Sony tried things; weird things that didn’t necessarily become big hits, but I’m still glad it took a stab at them because it’s kept the PS5 from aging out.
Peripherals like the PlayStation VR2, a second-generation version of the PSVR for PS4, opened up the console to more VR games and a 2D virtual screen to play PlayStation titles on. The PlayStation Portal, while not a standalone handheld on its own, let players stream their PS5 to it over Wi-Fi for remote play away from the console. A free software update has expanded the Portal’s functionality to allow streaming PlayStation games directly from the cloud instead of from a PS5. Sure, the PSVR 2 is largely a failure and the Portal doesn’t really compete with the Switch 2 or any handheld PC, but they gave the PS5 a moat. The Xbox Series X had no such thing.
The full-on hardware refresh with the slimmer PS5 and the more powerful PS5 Pro in 2024 has no doubt helped prop up the console as it enters its midlife. Does it suck that Sony hiked up prices for the PS5 and PS5 Pro a year later because of Trump’s nonsensical tariffs? Absolutely, but that doesn’t seem to have hurt PS5 sales as much as it has hurt Xbox Series X sales.
I’ll get to Sony bringing its PS5 exclusives to PC and what that means for PlayStation’s future in a second, but the one thing the company deserves more credit for is expanding the PlayStation brand beyond the console hardware.
A PlayStation will always primarily be a console that sits under your TV first, but it’s now also a family of devices that orbit it and any gaming PCs that can play its exclusive titles. Unlike Microsoft, which has leaned into Xbox being a service that can be played on any device, Sony sees PlayStation as an ecosystem and lifestyle gaming brand. In that way, it’s becoming more like Razer, which sells its own Blade gaming laptops, but also sells the peripherals designed for them.
When Sony announced its Inzone PC gaming brand of gaming headsets and monitors, which also worked with PS5, I knew it was only a matter of time before we got more. You didn’t need 20/20 vision to see that the Inzone products were heavily inspired by the PS5’s white and black design language.
This vast and growing ecosystem of PlayStation hardware only deepens and entrenches the platform as a place worth buying into. Like a sports team, consumers root for the companies and platforms they feel the general managers are growing. Sony is winning physical and psychological mindshare with PS5- and PC-compatible hardware, while Microsoft is… apparently trying to compete with TikTok and movies. In trying to make every device an Xbox, Microsoft has lost its focus on what console gamers crave—new consoles and the accompanying peripherals to make games more enjoyable—whereas Sony has only doubled down on core gamers.
PlayStation first, PC second
It’s such a strange thing to see once-exclusive Xbox games like Forza Horizon 5 and Gears of War: Reloaded on PS5, and Halo coming to Sony’s console in 2026. These franchises used to be fodder for taking sides, but not anymore. Now that Microsoft has prioritized publishing its games on as many platforms as possible, there’s almost no reason to be loyal to Xbox.
Time will tell whether chasing profits from games was worth sacrificing Xbox consoles at the altar, but Sony is facing the same challenge of rising game development costs. Bigger AAA games with more detailed graphics cost more money to make than ever before—hundreds of millions of dollars. So it only makes sense that publishing a game on as many platforms—even a competitor’s—is a more sustainable business model.
The difference is that Sony is not handing out its games to PC before it has milked them out on PS5 first. Well-reviewed games like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 released on PS5 in October 2023, but only on PC in January 2025, and Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut came out on PS5 in 2021, but on PC in May 2024. Even remastered versions of old titles like the PS4’s God of War, launched first on PS5 in May 2021 before arriving a year later on PC in January 2022.
This friendliness for publishing its games for PC and even making so much PC/PS5-compatible hardware has many thinking that Sony’s taking steps to follow Microsoft and become an all-platform publisher, but that’s just not going to happen. In case all the PS5 peripherals didn’t make it clear, the first and main platform that Sony wants gamers playing its games is on its own PlayStation consoles. PC is not an equal citizen; it’s second-class. Sony is only publishing its games on PC to recoup losses (if a game bombs) or gain additional revenue later (once PS5 sales have tapered off). Remember that most of the work of porting a game from PS5 to PC has already been done, thanks to the similarities in x86 system architecture for both platforms, so it’s more cost-efficient than it would have been pre-PS4 era.
Looking ahead, Sony is in a good position to launch its next-gen PlayStation—let’s just call it the PlayStation 6—in a few years and cruise to victory. Rumors suggest that the PS6 could launch in 2027 or 2028, which would be in line with past console lifecycles; the PS5 launched seven years after the PS4. Microsoft says it’s committed to premium Xbox hardware, which is expected to launch around the same time, but with all the missteps it’s made, the Xbox faithful may not pull up.
It also doesn’t help that Sony’s PS6 could resemble the Nintendo Switch 2 with a hybrid design that can go from console to handheld and vice versa. Or if the PS6 is a traditional console and a separate handheld, that could be concerning, too. Such a hardware departure could leave whatever Microsoft has planned for its Xbox Series X successor looking outdated if it also doesn’t have some handheld component.
Sony’s biggest threat isn’t a new Xbox or the Switch 2—it’s Valve’s newly announced Steam Machine that’s launching in early 2026. The 6 x 6-inch console is basically a tiny gaming PC that runs SteamOS, which means it can play your full library of Steam games. Tech specs and first impressions from the media show the Steam Machine is a capable enough 1080p and 1440p gaming box, but it may fall short of the performance from the PS5 Pro. Specs-wise, Sony has the edge now, and will for sure eclipse the Steam Machine with the PS6, but it’s not just Valve’s box that it will have to compete with. The same way the Steam Deck opened the door to bigger and more powerful handheld PCs to the point where the market quickly became saturated, the Steam Machine will be a blueprint for third-party companies, big and small, to launch their own SteamOS-based consoles. When—not if—that happens, Sony will face assault from more directions than it ever has.
Game exclusives and an expanding hardware ecosystem helped catapult the PS5 to the top and leave Xbox maimed and confused. It’s also something that Sony shouldn’t lose sight of for the PS6 and beyond. A steady stream of exclusives always sells new hardware. It’s always been this way and always will be. Just look at Nintendo. Mario, Zelda, and Pokémon carried the Switch to over 150 million units shipped worldwide, and it’s going to do the same thing for the Switch 2, which is already breaking records. If the PS6 isn’t as successful as the PS5, it’ll be because there aren’t enough exclusive games.
On days with light use, I have 70 percent left by bedtime. When I spent more time on the phone, using it for music streaming, navigation, and Instagram Reels-ing, I often ended with around 60 or 50 percent. I’d leave it on my nightstand without bothering to plug it in, a refreshing change of pace. Over the course of two days, I hit an amazing 10.5 hours of screen-on time.
This might be the best battery life on a flagship smartphone today in the US, especially when you pair it with the incredibly fast recharge times. OnePlus remains one of the only companies to include a charger in the box—mostly because it’s the only way to take advantage of its SuperVooc fast-charging technology. I was able to ramp from 15 to 80 percent in 30 minutes (50 percent in 15 minutes). It’s hard to worry about a dead phone if you don’t mind keeping the bulky charger on your person (is a folding prong too much of an ask?).
But there’s always a compromise somewhere. If you’re a fan of wireless charging and are especially interested in Qi2 smartphones that use magnets (like Apple’s MagSafe) for more convenient and faster charging, you’ll be disappointed here. The OnePlus 15 supports wireless charging, but only the standard Qi technology. OnePlus is selling magnetic cases as a salve, but unlike Samsung’s current crop of top-end phones, this doesn’t even turn it into a Qi2 Ready phone. It will only charge at slow Qi wireless charging speeds. (You can buy OnePlus’ proprietary wireless charger to fast-charge, but that’s a separate purchase, and that wireless charger will only recharge select OnePlus devices quickly.)
The beefy battery and super-fast wired charging may outshine the lackluster wireless charging, but now it’s time to talk about the second most impressive feat of the OnePlus 15: performance.
Power Play
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
This is the first smartphone in the US to employ Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, a processor we’ll see in most high-end Android phones in 2026. The benchmark numbers are excellent. In a Geekbench 6 test, the OnePlus 15 is officially the first phone to pass 10,000 in multi-core CPU performance, even besting the iPhone 17 Pro Max. However, the iPhone still had a slight leg up in single-core performance (it’s also generally more efficient).
The 5,000-mAh battery is ample for most days, and the Nothing Phone (3a) Lite could maybe even last two days of light use. You’ll have to plug in when it runs low (there’s no wireless charging), and the rate tops out at 33 watts. That’s not bad, enabling you to go from zero to 80 percent in less than an hour. There’s 5G, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.3 support, but expect the battery to drain much faster on 5G networks.
Where the MediaTek Dimensity 7300 Pro chipset and 8 GB of RAM really struggled for me was the camera. On several occasions, it took seconds to open, and I had to reboot the phone at one point to get the camera app to load at all. I encountered occasional lag on opening and switching apps, but the camera performance was jarring because general use feels relatively slick for a budget phone.
It doesn’t help that the camera system is disappointing. The main 50-megapixel shooter is capable, if a little slow, with a large-ish 1/1.57-inch sensor and an f/1.8 aperture that handles a range of scenarios quite well. But the 8-megapixel ultrawide is poor, and the 2-megapixel macro is a complete waste of time. Comparing a close-up with the macro and the main camera (see the flower photos) shows how useless it is. There’s a 16-megapixel shooter around front that’s fine for selfies and video calls.
You’d think a design-led company like Nothing would be more calculated in adding features that only add value. If the ultrawide and macro are only going to offer lackluster results, cut them and stick with a single, solid primary camera.
Bass: some speakers have it, and some don’t. It’s like charisma or generational wealth, except probably less important in determining your future. I’ve never personally found bass to be the most important metric for whether a wireless Bluetooth speaker is worth the money, but I’m fully aware that not everyone shares the same taste in bass as me, and even so, when it’s there in force, I can still appreciate it.
The problem is, especially when it comes to Bluetooth speakers of the portable variety, bringing the bass is harder than it sounds. There’s a reason why, in your home theater, the low end is usually incumbent on a big-ass subwoofer, which is a dedicated box kept separate from everything else. Bass is hard to generate without a large enough speaker that can move high volumes of air and generate proper low-end frequencies. It’s just physics. And as you might imagine, given what I just laid out, devising a portable speaker that can do that is no easy task.
It’s not easy, but it can be done, apparently, and the $500 Brane X portable Bluetooth speaker is living proof.
Brane X
The Brane X speaker has a huge amount of bass, but lacks in the app department.
The Brane X, though you may have never heard of it, is making a lofty claim. Brane claims this is the “first portable speaker with a true subwoofer built in.” If you’re like me, your alarm bells are probably going off; if it were possible, why hasn’t anyone done it before? That’s what I thought too, until I heard the Brane X for myself, or more specifically, felt how it shook the table I put it on.
The Brane X delivers on its promise, and it’s using some nifty engineering to do so. Inside this speaker, Brane says it’s using a proprietary tech called Repel-Attract Drivers (RAD), which uses magnets (however they work) to “cancel internal air pressure forces that inhibit deep bass in other portable speakers.” The result is a portable speaker that moves enough air to deliver real, woofer-level low end.
I know, you’re probably rolling your eyes again, but trust me, whatever is happening inside this speaker really works. To test the Brane X out, I connected my phone via Bluetooth and played a few different genres of music. To be honest, the speaker performed well on all of them, even genres where I don’t necessarily look for bass, like folk rock. In genres where you may want to hear more low end, like jazz, the Brane X literally shook Gizmodo’s coffee table, where I unceremoniously test lots of speakers. Again, bass isn’t the most important part of a Bluetooth speaker, in my opinion, but if it’s something you look for in a speaker, you are not going to have to try very hard to find it.
And if you somehow are still yearning for more bass, there’s a dedicated bass button on top of the speaker that lets you cycle through low, medium, and high levels. I tried all three and landed on medium as a good default since it highlighted the subwoofer without shaking my actual brain like the high setting does. The low setting, on the other hand, reins it in just a little too much, and then I feel like I’m getting just a little under what I know the speaker can do.
The best news, outside of a heavy amount of bass, is that it sounds good across the frequency spectrum, too. The Brane X feels fairly free of distortion at higher volumes, pushing 50% and above, and the soundstage (partially because of the subwoofer) registers as big and beefy. Listening to a remaster of The Replacements’ “Swingin’ Party,” I was really pleased with the ratio of vocals to music, and Magdalena Bay’s “2 Wheel Drive” really popped out of this speaker in a way I’ve not heard before, with bass blending perfectly with synths and airy, reverb-filled vocals. Seriously, if you’re often listening to electronic music, you’re going to love this thing.
Also, you’ll be happy to know that the Brane X supports hi-res formats, including SBC, AAC, aptX, and aptX HD, so you’re not always stuck streaming via regular Bluetooth, which compresses and degrades audio quality. It may seem wild to spend $500 on a portable Bluetooth speaker, and maybe it is, but in this case, at least the sound quality feels representative of the price.
How portable is it really?
You might be wondering how portable a speaker that crams a whole subwoofer inside could really be, and if you are wondering that, I don’t blame you. The answer? More portable than you might think, but also not nearly as portable as some others without a state-of-the-art woofer inside. Altogether, the Brane X weighs 7.7 pounds, which probably isn’t going to break any backs, but also ain’t nothin’ when it comes to the portable Bluetooth speaker label. For reference, the Bose SoundLink Plus, which at least makes an effort at tackling the Brane X in the bass department, weighs 3.37 pounds.
This isn’t a 1:1 comparison in a lot of ways since Bose’s SoundLink Plus isn’t using novel tech to cram a subwoofer inside, but it’s still worth noting given the fact that the SoundLink Plus does pack a pretty bassy punch. Let me just be clear here: if portability is a huge factor for you, this probably isn’t the speaker you’re looking for. If you’re okay with a bit of a hefty boy, then by all means, proceed. The good news, either way, is that Brane does a handle made from a flexible plastic that can be pushed down, out of sight, to wrap around the speaker when not in use.
On top of being heavy, the speaker is also a bit tall (about 6.1 inches high), but a fairly standard width at 9.3 inches. The design is round, kind of oval, and it looks like a little bread oven, which is neither offensive nor appealing to the eye for me. If I’m being honest, I wouldn’t necessarily want to carry the Brane X around in a backpack or a tote, but if you really wanted to transport it to a party or a friend’s house, you definitely could. In that way, it meets the definition of portable, but this is by no means the speaker that you’re going to want to bring on vacation or cart around in a backpack all day. In fact, I did actually carry the Brane X to and from work in a backpack and can attest to the heft.
The brains inside the Brane X
For $500, the Brane X should come with some nice-to-have features, and it does… on paper. One thing that might catch your attention if you have a smart home or use voice assistants regularly is that the speaker comes with Amazon’s Alexa built in. To activate Alexa on the speaker, you’ll need to download the Brane app and then link your Amazon account, and then you can use the speaker as you would any other smart speaker.
The good news is that, after messing around with the Brane X app for quite a while to get the speaker connected to Wi-Fi, it does work (pro tip: hold down the Bluetooth button on top of the speaker for a few seconds to activate the Wi-Fi pairing process). The problem is, the Alexa built-in feature on the Brane X is technically no longer supported, since Amazon has actually stopped adding any new third-party devices into the Alexa Built-In program, according to Brane. A spokesperson from Brane told me that the Brane X is grandfathered in, which means that the feature still technically works, but it’s not exactly ideal if you’re looking for feature longevity.
Another somewhat deflating realization is that, while you can use Alexa on the Brane X, you cannot sync Spotify if that happens to be your streaming service of choice, nor can you sync Apple Music. Instead, if you want to launch music on the speaker using the Alexa voice assistant, you’re relegated to Amazon Music, which is limiting. To make matters worse, a “Streaming” option inside the Brane app seems to suggest that you’re able to connect your preferred streaming service, but this, I’m told, is not the case due to “technical issues.”
As long as we’re talking about the app, it’s also worth noting that, while there are some features that you may want to use in this speaker’s companion app, like a 5-band EQ or adjusting the LED brightness, it’s pretty barebones overall. As far as companion apps go in personal audio products, the Brane X app is not the most functional (you can tell just from how barebones the UI looks), which may not matter for lots of people, but is a little deflating considering, again, this speaker costs $500.
The rest of the speaker works just fine. There is an array of touch-sensitive buttons on top for volume, bass adjustment, Bluetooth, turning the speaker mic on/off, and activating Alexa. Battery life is advertised as being 12 hours for moderate volumes, which feels accurate based on my testing. That’s not going to win any medals in the Bluetooth speaker Olympics, but it’s not horrible considering this thing has a subwoofer inside. On the back, there’s a physical power button, a 3.5mm aux in, and an AC power port for the included power adapter. Nothing mind-blowing here, and it all works just fine.
Spending $500 on a portable Bluetooth speaker is a big ask, so you’re probably wondering if a speaker like this could possibly be worth the price. The answer is… maybe, but only for the right person. That person, in my opinion, is someone who is really keyed in on bass in particular. If you’re left feeling like other Bluetooth speakers just aren’t giving you enough in the low-end department, the Brane X may be your holy grail. This speaker delivers on its promise of shoving a whole woofer inside a relatively portable form factor, and the rest of the sound (frequencies in the midrange and high range) also pulls its weight. Sound-wise, this speaker isn’t phoning it in, which is the main thing you want in a speaker.
The downside is that, if bass isn’t your number one priority, there are other Bluetooth speakers that have great sound, cost less, and blow the Brane X out of the water in terms of companion apps, looks, and portability (Bose’s SoundLink Plus, for example). So, for the right person (bass heads), the Brane X may be the smart choice, huge price tag be damned, but for everyone else, there’s just too much competition to really make it make sense. Don’t get me wrong, actually managing to shove a subwoofer inside a portable Bluetooth speaker is cool, but at the end of the day, you might be just as happy (and less poor) with something less cutting-edge.
The latest version of the Google Nest Cam Outdoor (wired, 2nd gen)—yeah, that’s the name—is a real Jekyll and Hyde of a product. The hardware and software interface are expertly crafted and a delight to use. But once you start looking more closely at Google’s AI-forward security camera, it gets ugly and annoying.
The $150 Nest Cam Outdoor’s biggest problem is that it’s not cheap to use. Like Ring and Arlo, Google’s security camera subscription plans have gotten more expensive than ever in recent years, pressing at the boundaries of what’s affordable for people in a time when everything else is also harder to pay for. And until now, it’s done so without adding any tangible benefit.
The calculus has changed a bit for Google. The company’s subscription service, now called Google Home Premium instead of Nest Aware, has expanded beyond its core product—a month or two of cloud video storage—to become a full-on smart home suite, complete with Gemini as a buddy. I didn’t get to test Gemini’s smart speaker features, as they’re in the midst of a timid early access rollout I’m not part of, but I did get to test the AI portion of this new experience that’s come to Google’s cameras. And so far, at least, it is very much not worth $10 or $20 a month.
Google Nest Cam Outdoor (wired, 2nd Gen, 2025)
Great camera hardware is hindered by subscription features that aren’t worth their asking price.
Searchable video history
Up to 60 days of video storage
Clear and crisp video
No need to worry about battery life
Easy to install
Too many paywalled features
Inaccurate AI summaries
AI notifications aren’t that useful
“Wired” means plugging into an outlet
Footage is constantly sent to Google
As bad as the AI features are, there are real things to like about the Nest Cam Outdoor, especially if you’ve enjoyed these cameras in the past. Its video feed, now in 2K resolution, is sharper than ever and delivers accurate colors by day and crisp, black-and-white infrared-lit images by night, making it easy to tell who someone is on camera. It records HDR footage at 30 fps and has a broad 152-degree diagonal field of view. That’s up from the 130-degree FOV of its battery-powered predecessor and makes it better for covering a large area like my backyard. Because the camera connects to the base magnetically, it’s very easy to point it where you want to. It’s also just a nice-looking piece of hardware, even if Google hasn’t really updated its appearance in many years.
There’s no floodlight on the new Nest Cam Outdoor—instead, a pair of infrared LEDs light up the area as far as 20 feet in front of the camera at night. It’s got a speaker and microphone inside so you can chat with people via Google Home on an iOS or Android device. Its microphone does a good job picking up voices on the other end, and its speaker is clear, but not any louder than those of other cameras like this.
Installation is as dead simple as that of an outdoor wired camera can be. You don’t connect this product directly to your house; a short cable sprouts from the device itself and runs through a magnetic base that you mount to your exterior wall using a couple of screws. You plug that short cable into a longer one, which you’ll then need to route through a window, door, or hole in the wall to an interior outlet. You can also plug it into an outdoor outlet, of course, if you’re not concerned about it being so easy to get to. Either way, it’s not as elegantly wire-free as battery-powered or hardwired cameras are, but at least it’s easy to set up.
As for its software, you’ll configure and use the camera via the clean, easy-to-navigate Google Home app. There are several features standard on security cameras like this; you can set up specific zones for different recording and notification behaviors on the screen, or crop the image closer and keep it that way. If you want to talk to someone in sight of the camera, you can do that, and it’ll come through nice and clear. It’s easy to poke through recorded events, which sit just below the camera’s live feed in the app. The camera’s settings are few but useful, including options to configure night vision or rotate the chassis 180 degrees if it’s mounted upside-down.
The Nest Cam Outdoor, with or without a paid subscription, does the everyday security camera things well. It never took more than 10 seconds for the Google Home app to notify me when something happened in my backyard, and it was generally good at identifying animals and people—although there’s an asterisk on that animal part, which I’ll get to later. It also does something I wish every camera did: it stops sending notifications if it detects the same kind of event repeatedly in a short span of time, so your phone won’t just buzz incessantly when someone is doing yard work. While I wish there were a way to tweak how this works or turn it off entirely, it’s a welcome feature.
The product does lack a few features that are common on this type of camera. Unlike the similarly priced Reolink Altas and cheaper Ring Outdoor Cam, there’s no siren, nor do you get the option to black out sections of the image—for example, if you don’t want the camera to record your neighbors’ houses. The most disappointing thing is that Google continues to refuse to offer local storage. You get six hours of cloud-based video history—that is, you can see any clips the camera recorded in the past six hours, which is double what the company had offered in the past and still not enough to make up for the omission of local storage. Anything more, and you’re on the hook for a subscription plan that’s only cheaper than streaming TV because it costs too much now.
Google has always lost me at its security camera storage approach, and that’s not just because of the price—$10 a month for 30 days of history and $20 a month for 60 days’ worth is heftier than Ring’s subscriptions, though roughly in line with what Arlo asks for. It’s fine for companies to charge for cloud storage, but only if there are other options—see the microSD card slots of the old Netatmo Presence or the Reolink Elite, or hub storage approaches like Eufy’s HomeBase. In all of those cases, you can browse your local storage via those companies’ apps. In the case of both Netatmo and Reolink, even if you’re having trouble seeing recordings in the app, you can always snatch the microSD card and look at recordings on your computer. The very existence of all of that as baseline-free features makes Google’s cloud subscription-only approach seem deeply cynical.
Of course, as I said above, there’s more to Google Home Premium than just cloud video storage. If you pay for the pricier Google Home Premium Advanced plan, you get the promise of AI features that let you pinpoint specific moments by searching your video history using vague, natural language in the Google Home app. You can also opt into 10 days of searchable, 24/7 video history and get AI summaries that resemble Apple Intelligence summaries on iOS. (We know how well those work.)
The absolute best part of all of this is that you can search that continuously recorded footage, and it will pick up clips even if they weren’t actually recorded as events. Toss out searches like “person carrying a box” or “me in a hat,” and you’ll get real matches. But don’t expect miracles—I wanted to see if it could tell me where I’d left my phone, so I asked if it had seen anyone leave a phone outside. It surfaced three clips of me walking outside and looking at my phone from days prior, but not a moment from that day when I had set a smartphone on a table in front of the camera. When I asked, “What about today?” it responded, “I don’t track personal items like phones.” Rude!
Google’s system does a decent job sending notifications when it sees a person or an animal, as cameras have for many years; the difference now is that it also tells you what they’re doing. So instead of “person spotted” or whatever, it says “a person exited the house,” or it might say that “a cat walked along the path towards the house.” It gets the details wrong a lot, though, like telling me a person left the house when they’ve only opened the door to let dogs out to pee, or repeatedly misidentifying the pets—dogs as cats and vice versa.
I could live with those issues, but things are more broken when you get to the “Home Brief” feature, which did surprisingly well, like when it said a person (me) was “observed carrying an Amazon package” in the garage, although it also said I set the box down, which I didn’t. Another time, it, uh, made it seem like my house was under siege:
“Wednesday began with a black cat running towards the house and sitting by the door in the morning. Several dogs, including a brown and white one and a black dog, were also seen walking along the path and into the yard. Around midday, various dogs, including a black dog and a brown dog wearing a blue vest, were observed walking along the path.
In the afternoon, a person wearing a teal jacket departed the house, followed shortly by someone with a backpack entering. The evening saw a cat exiting the house, and later, multiple instances of people exiting the house, sometimes accompanied by a dog. A person was also seen carrying a box and a bag, sitting down to look into the box, before another person in a hoodie entered. The day concluded with more arrivals, including a person carrying an object and someone with a backpack entering the house.”
Cue the Star Wars: The Last Jedi meme in which Luke tells Rey, “Impressive; every word in that sentence is wrong.” The black cat was actually my dog. There weren’t several or various dogs; just two. The person in a teal jacket and the one with a backpack were the same. And that bit at the end was me taking out the trash—I never sat down or looked into the box I was taking out to the recycling bin.
I like the idea of this feature, but the execution—as ever, when AI isn’t ready for the task it’s being given—comes off sloppy and unfinished. Some of the problems could be fixed with wording tweaks to account for the fact that the AI system isn’t recognizing that when a person leaves the frame and another person enters a couple of minutes later wearing the same-colored clothes, it’s probably the same person. And it would be more useful if it only called out unusual occurrences, and if Google’s facial recognition were better at identifying me—it correctly did so a few times throughout my week of testing and otherwise only saw “a person.”
All of this is undeniably a meaningful step forward for smart home security cameras and digital smart home assistants. But it’s also so flawed, and there are so many free alternatives that are almost as good—Reolink, for example, recently debuted a similar AI search feature for some of its cameras that’s not quite as robust but is free and on-device—that it’s not worth $20 a month.
What about the $10-per-month “Standard” plan that gets you 30 days of event history, no 24/7 recording, and fewer new AI features? It does unlock facial recognition (unless you live in Illinois) and notifications for things like when you’ve left your garage door open, which I tested and which, like the AI summaries, was often wrong, telling me the garage door had opened when, in fact, it had not. To its credit, it did tell me the one time I left the door open, notifying me five times, at five-minute intervals, that I’d done so.
Oh, you also get access to Gemini via smart speakers, but again, that’s in early access for now. You’ll also get notifications if a Google smart speaker or Nest camera has heard an alarm (smoke or carbon monoxide) or breaking glass. The best new feature that comes with this subscription, though, is “Help me create,” a button in the Google Home app’s automations tab that tasks AI with creating automations for you, based on descriptions you type into a text field. Of all the AI features I tried with the Nest Cam Outdoor, this one might have worked the best, creating automations that did a great job approximating what I was going for, even with vague descriptions like “Make it look like there’s a party happening if the backyard camera detects an unfamiliar face.” The automation was far from the fake party that Kevin McCallister threw to ward off The Wet Bandits in Home Alone; it announced “It’s party time” on all my Google Home speakers and set all the lights to turn on and off in a one-minute cycle. It’s not what I would’ve done, but it took five seconds to enable and was, maybe, good enough to make someone think twice about breaking in.
Google’s AI isn’t ready to pull its weight
It’s easy to see what Google is going for with the AI upgrade to its smart home ecosystem. I would love to be able to casually ask a digital assistant where I left my phone or what time my kid got home and have it give me an accurate answer right away. It would be great if the AI models peering through my security cameras could tell me if something truly unusual happened, rather than making a mundane day of me doing a little tidying up in my garage or backyard sound like a full-on home invasion. Hell, it’d be nice just to have it tell me when it sees my dogs at the back door so I don’t have to stand there waiting for them to be done peeing.
Looking at the Google Nest Cam Outdoor not as a security camera but as eyes for Google’s Gemini AI system to see with makes a spendy subscription start to make sense—kind of—if it offers all the things I described above. But it doesn’t, and I can’t bring myself to pay $20 every month for an AI model that lies to me so often about what’s happening around my house. Especially not at a time when I’ve canceled almost every streaming service I love because I can’t afford them, and I don’t buy steak because it costs nearly double what it used to. If I’m going to spend a bunch of money on something these days, it had better be good. And the Google Nest Cam Outdoor just isn’t, with or without a subscription.
The OLED looks great, but one of the benefits of OLED is HDR in gaming, thanks to the incredible contrast from being able to turn off individual pixels. OLED isn’t known for being bright, but lately, that’s improved on laptops and external monitors. The OLED display on the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 10, for example, can be cranked up to over 1,000 nits, creating an impressive HDR effect. The Razer Blade 14, however, only maxes out at 620 nits in HDR and 377 nits in SDR. Because of that, I could hardly tell HDR was even turned on. It’s still a pretty screen, and OLED has other benefits over IPS panels, including faster response times, less motion blur, and higher contrast.
Unfortunately, the Razer Blade 14’s OLED panel is not as colorful as the one I tested on the Razer Blade 16, with a color accuracy of 1.3 and 86 percent coverage of the AdobeRGB color space. Also, the 120-Hz refresh rate is standard for OLED laptops, but you can get 240-Hz speeds on laptops that use IPS, like the Alienware 16X Aurora, which happens to be a much cheaper device.
The Razer Blade 14’s biggest competition is the ROG Zephyrus G14. I haven’t tested the latest model yet, but it’s a laptop we’ve liked for years now, and it’s on sale often enough for less than the Blade 14. The only real difference is that the Blade 14 uses a more powerful AMD processor, the Ryzen AI 9 365. Not only does it perform better in anything CPU-intensive, such as certain games and creative applications, but it’s also a more efficient chip.
That leads to some improved battery life—at least, better than your average gaming laptop. I got 10 hours and 19 minutes in a local video playback test, which is about the most you can expect to get from the device. On the other hand, Asus offers higher-powered configurations of the Zephyrus G14, including one that includes the more powerful Ryzen AI 9 HX.
The RTX 5070 Takes Charge
Photograph: Luke Larsen
Bad news: The RAM is no longer user-upgradeable on the Razer Blade 14, so you’ll have to configure it up front with what you need. My review unit had 32 GB, but you can also choose either 16 GB or 64 GB. Because it’s soldered, the memory speeds are faster. As for internal storage, you still get one open M.2 slot to expand space if you need it, supporting up to 4 TB.
The Omni looks nice. It’s a step up from your average office chair design, with a bit of class and a design language on the backrest that resembles the spine-like look of the Herman Miller Embody. It comes in Midnight Black or Space Gray (creative names), and my unit is the latter. The company says the Omni can support people up to 300 pounds.
I don’t think I’ve sat on an office chair with softer padding than the Omni. The multi-density sponge cushion material of the seat and backrest is plush without feeling like you’re sinking in, because it isn’t super thick. It’s very comfortable, and the softness of the material is still what surprises me the most about the Omni after sitting on it for weeks.
It’ll be interesting to see how the fabric holds up after more than a year of use. So far, it still looks great after close to a month of sitting, though it likes to collect hair. It’s hard to gauge breathability as we’re now in the cooler months, but my back feels a little warm after a few hours on the chair. If you’re in a hot environment, you’ll likely feel sweaty. It’s not as bad as the vegan leather-covered foam on most gaming chairs, but it won’t offer the breathability of a true mesh.
The armrests aren’t much to write home about—you can move them up or down, forward and back, and angle them inward or outward. You can’t push them toward or away from your body like on the Embody, but this is standard for a chair at this price (which is $1,099 MSRP, though the company seems to have a persistent sale of $848). I appreciate that the arms don’t easily shift or slide around, which is a common problem with many chairs. The armrest itself isn’t too hard, and the material feels fairly durable.
A Battery-Powered Chair
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
The Bionic FlexFit Backrest is the Omni’s highlight, which uses the battery-powered ErgoPulse Motor System for configuration. It’s essentially a motorized way to ensure the backrest lines up perfectly against your back; no need to fiddle around with an awkward lumbar support. There are three buttons on the left armrest. The front two shift the backrest support up or down, and the third is a spinal massage function, which I’ll address later.
When technology is at its best and focused on improving our lives, like a great-sounding pair of wireless headphones or a really good computer mouse, it can be indispensable. But when the companies making our gadgets drift away from the user experience and start checking off boxes and publishing bigger numbers, the basics can get lost in the mix.
That’s exactly what’s happening with the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller, a premium robot vacuum with perhaps too many ideas. Which is not to say the ideas are bad. In fact, the Aqua10 Ultra Roller is gadget-y in ways that I always hoped robots would be when I was a kid in the ‘90s, all whirring motors and parts that pop out of its body to do things. Its mop roller juts out of its side for better edge mopping, the periscope-like sensor array sinks into the body to let it go under things, and little legs let it climb over obstacles and onto slightly higher surfaces. I love that stuff, and it all seems to work just fine.
Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller
The Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller is an expensive disappointment.
Lots of clever robotic features
Solid mopping performance
Self-maintaining mop roller
Tangle-free roller brush
Mediocre vacuuming
Very buggy navigation
Poor battery life
Too expensive
Unintuitive, complicated app
But things haven’t come together for the Aqua10 elsewhere. And unfortunately, it was the robot vacuum basics—navigating my home, sucking up debris, and managing its own charge—where the Aqua10 failed the hardest while I was testing it. I think Dreame could fix these problems with a few software updates, but as things stand, I’d be sorely disappointed if I’d paid $1,600 for a product that has so much trouble with these standard tasks.
The Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller is a big white circle that stands tall, at 3.84 inches, or 4.72 inches with its sensor array extended. Where it differs from a lot of robot vacuums is all those robotic parts serving different purposes. It’s fun watching the sensor array lower until it’s flush with the body to get under my couch, and it’s satisfying to see the mop roller slide out to follow the contours of furniture. Same goes for the side brush, when it pops out to slap dust out of corners its big disc shape would otherwise make difficult to reach.
Tucked into the Aqua10’s side wheel wells is a pair of stubby legs, with wheels on the ends, that unfold and jut downward to shove the robot up at an angle. (In this mode, it sort of resembles the Wheelers from Return to Oz, except not terrifying.) I don’t have any transitions that actually require the Aqua10 to use this feature—though it did decide, twice, that a dining room rug in my home called for it—so I stacked up some shelving wood I had lying around. I couldn’t get to exactly the 1.65 inches that Dreame says it can handle at once, but the robot climbed onto a 1.5-inch-tall stack just fine. It’s no stair climber, but I have no worries about this robot vacuum balking at thicker carpets.
You can adjust how each of the robotic parts behaves if you’re willing to explore the labyrinthine depths of the Dreamehome app. Here, you’ll find pages and pages of menus, toggles, and sliders that seemingly let you tweak everything about the robot. Want to set the mop roller never to extend, or to do so only once a week? You can do that. Want to set the robot to clean every night, but to avoid mopping one specific room on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Also possible. You can set suction power; or decide if you want the robot to vacuum and mop room-by-room or vacuum every room, then mop every room; or set it only to mop in the direction of a hardwood floor’s planks to avoid roughing up the long edges.
Neat stuff, and it’s nice to have options, but wow is it a lot, and not to mention arranged in a way that I think will turn many folks into the Homer Simpson backing into shrubbery meme. That could be mitigated were more power user-oriented features tucked one layer deeper than the more straightforward ones like scheduling and cleaning history, which ought to be right on the Aqua10 landing page and aren’t.
Also, some options just feel like padding. For instance, on one page, you can tell the robot not to mop the carpet. That should just be standard behavior—I shouldn’t need to forbid rug-mopping! Others don’t appear to do anything at all, including many parts of a suite of “Pet Care” features. With Pet Care turned on, the Aqua10 is supposed to do more intense cleaning around things like pet dishes and litter boxes. It was hard to evaluate this around my dogs’ dishes—mainly because they just aren’t messy eaters—but the Aqua10 seemed to do the opposite of intense cleaning around our cat’s litter box, leaving a lot of debris behind. “Pet Moments” identifies your pets and takes pictures of them, although it only captured two images—one still and one GIF—of mine during my time with it. Dreame told Gizmodo it’s possible my pets were just “camera-shy,” which they weren’t; they’re very used to robot vacuum hijinks and seem to almost relish being in the way. Perhaps the Aqua10 looked upon them and found them wanting (in which case, sorry to Dreame’s algorithms, but we are in disagreement).
Other features just aren’t labeled clearly, a common feature of apps made by non-English-speaking developers. Take the toggle for Collision-Avoidance Mode. I would assume that turning this off would have the device barreling into walls and furniture, but that’s not really what it does. It’s more like switching it from a vacuum that’s very cautious not to touch walls to one that isn’t quite as careful.
Finally, there’s not a whiff of support for the universal smart home platform Matter, despite the fact that it’s promised on the Aqua10’s product page. Dreame told Gizmodo that Matter support is coming by the end of November with a software update. That’s all good, but why advertise it as being Matter-compliant if it’s not yet? Until that update, Aqua10 owners will have to make do with Amazon Alexa or Google Home integration, basic automations using the Apple Shortcuts app, or the robot’s built-in voice assistant, which is clunky at best and requires a lot of rote memorization of pre-programmed commands.
It’s possible that Dreame bit off more than it could chew in time for launch. But if these features weren’t ready yet, the least the company could’ve done was mark them “coming soon” or “beta.” Otherwise, it just feels like all these toggles are just there to make the robot seem more featureful than it actually is.
I was deeply annoyed once I actually started using the Aqua10. Before we get to why, let’s start with what this robot does well. Thing number one is all of the robotic stuff. Apart from the robotic legs doing their thing when I tried testing it, the extending mop roller is really good at following the contours of things like furniture while mopping, slipping in and out of the Aqua10’s side as it drives alongside them. And it was cool watching it sink its sensor cluster down into its body to go under furniture, then raise it again as it exited. Its object recognition is very solid—it definitely still tried to vacuum up things like screws and marbles, but the Aqua10 would not be fooled into sucking up socks or towels I placed in its way, nor a pile of coffee grounds I plopped down as a makeshift pet poop simulation.
Mopping performance was solid, although not as good as Dreame’s marketing materials would have you believe (imagine that!). Despite all of its features—a robotic mop roller, which self-rinses during cleans and gets a heated bath of sorts when docked; a software slider in the Dreamhome app to set how wet you want the roller during cleans; options to set higher or lower downward mopping pressure; and the ability to tweak how tightly it overlaps its cleaning passes—the Aqua10 is good for regular maintenance mopping and not much more. It left behind streaks of ketchup when I squirted a patch of my floor with the stuff. It didn’t make a dent in a dried mystery stain in my dining room. In both cases, the roughly $500-cheaper Matic robot I recently reviewed did a better job, totally clearing the ketchup as well as the exact stain the Aqua10 failed to clean. On the plus side, the Aqua10 never mopped any of my rugs—its ability to discern between carpets and hard floors was spot-on, at least in my house.
Before and after mopping runs, the Aqua10 Ultra Roller’s dock—a complicated, mini-fridge-sized piece of machinery—goes to work. Behind a panel in the front are the floor cleaning solutions and dustbag, and beneath the lid on top, two large tubs for clean and dirty water. You’ll hear humming, gurgling, and spitting from the dock as it pumps water to and from the robot in preparation for a clean. During this, the Aqua10 sprays heated water over its mop roller, which turns, scrubbing itself on a recessed, textured plate in the dock. This whole process lasts for several minutes as the Aqua10’s built-in speaker announces, each step of the way, what it’s doing. (If you find that as annoying as I do, you can turn the voice down; all the way to zero, if you want.) All of this isn’t too loud, per se, it’s just an aggressive amount of activity for something that just does an okay job at mopping.
While we’re on the subject of noise: When the Aqua10’s dock auto-empties the robot’s dustbin, it’s about as blaring as the Eufy L35+ Hybrid I own. Which is to say, it’s startling if you’re in the same room and didn’t expect it, and I would definitely restrict when it can do that, using the app’s Do Not Disturb schedule.
As for vacuuming, or what is really job number one of these devices, the Aqua 10 wasn’t a lot better than my almost-three-year-old and poorly maintained Roomba J7. It missed a lot more than I would’ve expected during nightly cleans, leaving behind little scraps of paper or small rocks that had been tracked into my house. The same goes for spot cleans; the Aqua10 would spread bits of dirt with its side brush, flinging them out of range before missing them later.
When I ran the Aqua10 on my basement rugs, which don’t get vacuumed as often as the rest of my home, it did this weird thing where it pooped out balled-up hair and string after they were caught in its anti-tangle brush roller, then left them behind when it finished cleaning. Sure, just about every robot vacuum misses things, and picking balls of hair up by hand is definitely better than having to painstakingly cut them off of a roller like with the Roomba J7, but if I’m paying $1,600 for a robot, I don’t want to do nearly this much cleaning up after it. When I flipped the robot over and looked under its dual rollers after a week of testing, I saw a clog forming where built-up hair and string was partially blocking the area around the suction hole, which I thought could be why the Aqua10 was leaving so much behind on its cleans, but it didn’t do better when I ran it again after clearing the blockage.
The worst part of the whole experience was that I couldn’t count on the Aqua10 Ultra Roller to finish a clean without babysitting it. It needed to recharge itself after cleaning between 190 sq. ft. and 300 sq. ft. of my house every night—battery life is definitely an issue—and so would stop working and go look for the dock. More than half the time it didn’t make it there. Most of those times, it found the dock but just didn’t manage to park in it—why it didn’t was unclear, and it would dock just fine when I found it in the morning and pressed the Aqua10’s physical home button. Once, it drove around to the hallway behind where the dock is and sat there until it ran out of battery. Every robot vacuum I’ve ever owned or tried has similar problems, but usually only occasionally; this was almost every night, even after remapping the floor and taking care to move the chairs in my dining room, where the dock lived, so it had plenty of runway.
On one of the final nights of testing, I sat and watched the Aqua10 clean, then timed it as it spun around and around in front of its dock at the end, pausing to move a bit here and there before spinning in more circles. It took more than six minutes for it to settle on an approach vector and park to recharge. It was like watching a bugged-out Skyrim NPC. This was after it not only drove over several bits of dirt and paper throughout my home without collecting them, but also spit out new pieces of garbage in my dining room that it got from who-knows-where.
Privacy is a concern
Robot vacuums have an unusually personal kind of access to us that other products do not. If their manufacturers want, they can gather details about the layout of your home, your habits throughout the day, how your space changes as time goes on, how many people live in or visit your home, and even how much dirt and dust you generate. Their cameras are pointed at you and your home from all kinds of angles, and some, like the Aqua10, even have microphones to power voice assistants. I’m not saying Dreame is abusing this access, but I am saying that when products like this require an internet connection to work, they also require a massive level of trust. Robot vacuum companies probably can’t glean as detailed a picture of your life as a smartphone manufacturer can, but the data points could still be valuable as marketers (or government agencies) seek to build a more comprehensive picture of who you are and what you like to do. It’s not something we all want to think too deeply about, and many of us are resigned to it at this point. But it’s still worth looking at what your robot vacuum and its associated software might be doing behind the scenes.
And just so you know, there is a lot of extra chatter coming from the Dreamhome app, especially the first few days after I set up the Aqua10. My iOS App Privacy Report indicated that Dreamehome had, at one point, contacted 185 different domains in the seven days prior. Many were Dreame’s own domains, but others belonged to companies like Facebook, Baidu, and Google, and some—one of which the app had contacted more than 500 times in just a few days—are completely unnamed. (When I looked up the one in question, it appeared to be Alibaba’s cloud compute service.) The next most-active platform, YouTube, had pinged 173 mostly Google-owned domains, one of which it reached nearly 400 times. For a more direct comparison, the iRobot app had reached out to 37 domains, including a handful of what looked like trackers, and the Matic app had contacted exactly one web address: the local IP address of the Matic robot.
Like a lot of people, I’ve come to accept that there is a data privacy trade-off when it comes to using certain devices. I don’t like it, but it’s nearly impossible to use modern technology without accepting it. And as a gadget reviewer, I give my data to a lot of different apps in the course of my work. But I am highly suspicious of any app that’s contacting that many domains. Dreame’s spokesperson told me some of the app’s features are “the result of collaboration with external partners,” who provide it with “a ready-made system that includes a variety of embedded third-party tools,” like statistical code and video players. These tools, they said, “make calls to their own respective servers, which accounts for the high volume of network connections that you have observed.”
That’s all well and good, and the app seemed to settle down after the first few days of testing to just contacting 53 domains in the previous 7 days as of this writing. And yet, even if that’s mostly just to support the app’s features, it’s still a lot of opaque outgoing communication from a single smart home appliance’s app.
So busy, now!
In the movie The Fifth Element, Gary Oldman’s character (“Jean-Baptiste. Emmanuel. Zorg.”) pushes a drinking glass off his desk to illustrate his villainous view that by destroying things, he gives life the opportunity to flourish. As the glass shatters, several robots parade out from a hidden wall compartment to clean up the mess. His idea is that these robots were created by hundreds of people who are able to keep feeding their families and prosper through this sort of continuous destruction.
It’s a scene I kept thinking about while testing this product, and it’s not Zorg’s bullshit ethical posturing that’s been on my mind. It’s something else he says: “Look at all these little things. So busy, now! Notice how each one is useful.” As he’s saying this, two robots with flashing lights cordon off the area, one sweeps up the mess, another sprays liquid onto the ground, and a final one spins about, mopping.
I don’t just bring this up in hopes that someone will validate my taste in movies. It also helps me make a point: for whatever reason, the filmmakers assumed that the best approach to floor-cleaning robots is to make them narrow-purpose devices. I don’t think you have to go as far as to have an individual robot for spraying floor cleaner, but as I wrote this review, I kept thinking about how my favorite gadgets are often the ones focused on being really good at a small number of things. Maybe it’s because if something is made to accomplish one or two tasks, it’s unforgivable if it sucks at those. If it’s made to do a whole bunch of things, it can get away with doing some of them poorly. It feels like Dreame is almost counting on that possibility.
If there’s a bright side, it’s that most of the Aqua10 Ultra Roller’s problems seem like the sort that can, and hopefully will, be fixed with software updates the way a few good patches can turn an unfinished, bad video game good. But it’s one thing to spend between $60 and $70 (or, sigh, $80) on a glitchy, unfinished game. It’s another entirely to drop several hundreds or more on a robot vacuum that can’t appreciably out-vacuum my dusty old Roomba J7, is missing advertised features like Matter support, and has so much trouble finishing a clean. At the end of the day, the only thing the Aqua10 does reasonably well right now is mopping. And, uh, who wants to pay $1,600 for that? Until and unless its issues are fixed, it doesn’t seem worth it. Just buy a mop.
Aura has been trying for years to get us to mount its frames. The Aura’s first frame back in 2017, the Aura Classic, was wall-mountable, and then Aura’s latest frames, like the Aura Aspen, have had a flat, wall-mountable design. But the downside was the cord running below it for all of these models, which takes away from the clean gallery-wall design it’s otherwise well-suited for, and limits the locations it can be hung.
Now, with the Aura Ink’s truly cordless design, it’s possible to hang it without any cord clutter. The 13-inch screen makes it a little larger than the 12-inch Aura Aspen but smaller than the 15-inch Walden, and is a nice size for hanging. The Ink comes with a little mounting kit of two nails and a small hook that the digital frame clicks into, and it can easily click back off for charging (the charging port is on the side if your hanging spot is near an outlet). I was able to hang it on one of my existing pushpins without issue, and the frame easily blended into my existing gallery wall.
Overall, it’s an impressive feat of technology, though I wouldn’t call it perfect. I’d like to see the front light get a little brighter. It’s considerably more expensive than other digital photo frames, too. But as I look at it on my gallery wall, I have to say that if you didn’t already know it was digital, you’d likely have no idea. If you’re looking for a frame like that for your home, this is the one to get.
As I wore them on one of my walks through San Francisco, on the shore of Ocean Beach, I came upon a dolphin-like fish that had washed up on the sand. Though I got my camera glasses close enough to the thing that I could smell it, Meta’s AI assistant could not tell me what kind of animal it was. It correctly identified that it was very dead and that I should not touch it. It was then able to direct me to a number to call for city animal control services.
Beyond instances like that, I tend to avoid the AI voice interaction because I haven’t gotten to the point where it feels natural. Getting it to search something is usually very quick, but doing so requires you to stop dead in your tracks, stare directly at another person’s purse or something, and say out loud, “Hey Meta. HEY META. Is this bag Gucci?”
The glasses’ AI features are both its best asset and biggest weakness. Features like live language translation and whispered map directions are very helpful. But if you’ve spent any time curating the AI slop out of your Facebook feed lately, you’ll know that Meta just can’t help pack a firehose blast of AI features into everything it does.
The software features are funneled through the same app as Meta’s AI services. That’s where pictures and videos go by default, and sometimes you have to go into the app to import the files from the glasses. There’s a very clear problem with using the app: bad vibes.
The Vibes Are Off
When you go into the Meta AI app to look at the pictures or videos you’ve taken, the first thing you’ll see is Meta’s terrible new Vibes service. It’s a constant barrage of AI slop videos that Meta just one day foisted upon its app users. Vibes is akin to OpenAI’s dubious Sora app, but somehow even worse quality.
Granted, this is probably only the case for big people like me (6’ 4”, 255 pounds, and with very broad shoulders) and it might not even register for average-sized people. In fact, at 6’ 4”, I’m an inch too big for the XP4, at least according to the brand, which says the bike fits riders 4’ 10” to 6’ 3”. But that extra inch feels negligible, as, over my first 150 miles on the bike, my legs have yet to feel hemmed in by my saddle height.
Speaking of that saddle, the bike’s seat post features an integrated suspension coil, offering 40 mm of travel. While, in theory, some rear suspension is welcome, I felt as though, every time the coil compressed, it was actually my seat tube slipping down into the frame. It was a strange sensation and one I must admit that, some 200 miles into riding the bike, I haven’t quite gotten used to.
Something else I don’t love about the XP4 is its old-school, one-sided kickstand. A bike of this heft should feature a motor-scooter-style stand that retracts from beneath the bottom-bracket, giving even support to both sides of the machine. The one-sided kickstand, however, often finds itself (and me!) fighting gravity when I’m trying to lock the bike up on anything resembling an incline.
All told, those very few shortcomings are hardly enough to make me not love the XP4 750, as it’s smooth ride, extra-long range, handsome design, and litany of aftermarket add-ons make this a bike I would commute with for a long, long time.
My first reaction when I put on Meta’s $800 Ray-Ban Display was excitement. As frivolous as it may seem to have yet another screen in your life, there’s something that happens when you basically glue a display to your eyeball. You transform from a person with glasses to, like, a spy, or a cyborg—a cyborg spy! Yeah, that’s it. Ghost in the Shell fans will get it.
When I initially donned these smart glasses at Meta Connect, I smiled because this was what I felt had been missing from my previous Ray-Ban smart glasses experience. A big, bright, full-color screen—the one thing people always wanted to know about when I showed them my deflatingly screenless Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses.
That little dose of magic is even further heightened by Meta’s Neural Band, a small wristband that, when slipped over your hand, reads the electrical signals in your arm, allowing you to navigate the Meta Ray-Ban Display with a series of finger pinches and thumb swipes.
Meta Ray-Ban Display
Meta’s Ray-Ban Display is impressive hardware that’s limited by its lack of apps.
Display is impressive
Neural Band feels like magic
Navigation and notifications can be useful
Battery life holds up
Not enough apps
Camera isn’t upgraded
Neural Band can be uncomfortable over long periods
Probably a privacy nightmare
Existentially exhausting
The only other experience I can liken this combo to is the first time I used Apple’s Vision Pro, which creates a similar kind of magic, sans wrist-worn wearable. In the Vision Pro and Meta’s Ray-Ban Display, you’re using technology the same way a wizard casts a spell, waving your hand to make the computer do the things computers do, which, if you’ve watched as much sci-fi and fantasy as I have, is pretty f*cking rad.
Weirdly, I’m reminded of my grandma (my nonna, actually; sorry for being Italian), when I first showed her how to use a computer mouse on my family’s PC when I was a kid. You move this little plastic thing on a desk, and it moves something on a screen! Groundbreaking! It seemed silly to me at the time, but now, as I get older… I get it. Inputs and screens are exciting, no matter how jaded we get with the experience of using them.
So, there it is. Excitement; that was my first reaction to the Meta Ray-Ban Display. My first reaction. It’s not, however, my last.
If you’re like most people, the first thing you’re probably dying to know about the Meta Ray-Ban Display is how they actually look when they’re on your face.
The titular display part of the Meta Ray-Ban Display is a 90Hz (30Hz minimum) 600 x 600-pixel full-color screen with a 20-degree field of view in the bottom-right corner of the right lens. The good news about having a screen in that area specifically is that it doesn’t obstruct your vision when you’re walking around and doing stuff. The bad part? Well, every time you look at it, you’re looking down and away as though you’re worried a snake might slither in and lunge at you. It’s not what I would call a natural resting face (let’s call it resting Meta face), but let’s be honest, there is nothing natural about walking around with a screen strapped to your eyeball.
The screen inside the Meta Ray-Ban Display is also very bright, with a max brightness of 5,000 nits. This might not seem like a stat you want to pay attention to, but believe me, in a pair of smart glasses, it’s critical. I’ve used less bright screens in other pairs, and they’re hard to see outside. And if you’re spending $800 (before tax) on a pair of smart glasses, you’d better be able to use them while you’re walking around in the real world.
In terms of style, you should know that all Meta Ray-Ban Display have transition lenses by default. That may seem like a bummer if transitions aren’t your thing, but it makes sense, since the screen needs to be effective indoors and out, and the only way to do that is by giving it contrast in direct sun. Conversely, it also provides see-through lenses indoors so you don’t go stepping on your cat or something. I find the screen to be very visible even in direct sun, probably because of the added contrast from the transition lenses. Also, you can buy these with prescription lenses, so that’s good news for those reading this from behind a pair of regular glasses.
But just because the Meta Ray-Ban Display are bright does not mean the screen is perfectly sharp. I find the screen to be sharp enough to satisfy the dream I had in my head of what a pair of display smart glasses from Meta would look like, but others might be less enthused. I also noticed that some people might see the screen differently than I do. One colleague in my office described the screen as “shaky,” though I wouldn’t describe it that way at all. Others said they struggled to see it or that it was disorienting.
One thing I definitely found disorienting is that the lenses in the Meta Ray-Ban Display are actually mirrored. This, I assume, is part of the construction of the “geometric waveguides,” which is what the display tech inside the smart glasses is called. Geometric waveguides are special because they use mirrors to cut down on visual artifacts by reflecting light instead of splitting it like diffractive waveguides in other smart glasses. It also makes it so the screen is hard to see from the other side, which, by the way, is true. People probably aren’t going to know your screen is on unless you’re in a dark area and the brightness is turned up.
The benefits of using a geometric waveguide are clear, but it can also be distracting at times, since you can see behind you if you look to the right, or even sometimes when you’re looking straight ahead. I do feel like my visibility actually decreases when I’m wearing the Meta Ray-Ban Display, probably more than when I wear other smart glasses with a screen in them.
That being said, I find the screen to be up to snuff, if not the highest resolution in the world, but I highly recommend you go see for yourself before buying a pair. Luckily, Meta is requiring people to get sized for wristbands in-store anyway, but hey, maybe you’re considering buying them aftermarket! And, if you are, I would suggest… not. The lesson of the screen, if there is one to be had, is that, though your experience may vary. It is surprisingly bright, if not always sharp or hi-res. Ultimately, the screen is just a part of the picture; it’s also about what you can do on said screen, and on that front, the possibilities are… not endless.
So… now what?
As cool as controlling a UI by waving your fingers in the air is, that thrill (for most at least) probably won’t last forever, and when it fades, you’re going to wonder to yourself, “Okay, so what now?” In Meta’s case, the “what now” part consists of a few things, and I really mean a few.
You’ve got bread-and-butter phone-type stuff like messaging, which encompasses Meta’s first-party messaging apps like WhatsApp or Messenger on Facebook and Instagram. It also, thank god, works with both iOS and Android, allowing you to both send and receive messages from your phone. In the smart glasses display, all of those notifications can be shown as they roll in, popping up as a bubble. You can also opt, via the Meta AI app (where you’ll have to connect Instagram, WhatsApp, and your phone) to have messages read out loud through the built-in speakers. Personally, I find that feature to be a little annoying. You have a screen now; you might as well use it.
As you might imagine, the Meta Ray-Ban Display are more integrated with Instagram and WhatsApp than they are with your phone. For example, in the Instagram app, you can even watch Reels that are sent to you via DMs, which is a nice touch if you want to catch up with that one friend who spams you with memes while you’re commuting on the subway. Sending pictures via your phone, however, is a little less clean. In iOS, pictures show up as a link that the person has to tap in order to see the picture. It’s a small hurdle, but one that creates just a little bit more friction than a first-party gadget would.
Mostly, though, the friction isn’t a dealbreaker. Messaging someone from the Meta Ray-Ban Display connected to your phone (in my case iOS) is pretty simple, though you still have to use the voice assistant on the smart glasses to do so. I tried texting my colleague, Ray Wong, for example, by saying “Text Ray,” and fortunately, Meta AI asked me, “Which Ray?” After that, I was able to use my thumb to select the correct one and then pinch “dictate” to say my message out loud, which in this case was, “I’m texting you from my stupid glasses.” I was even able to respond with a thumbs-up emoji after Ray texted back, “You look like a dork.”
There’s nothing revolutionary about being able to send and receive messages with smart glasses, but I will say being able to see notifications as they roll in is a novel experience, and the ease with which you can respond feels more refined than you’d expect from a category of device that feels like it’s only existed for five minutes.
Outside of messaging, there’s also video calling, which works about the same as it did on the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1 and 2 AI smart glasses, though with a new video calling feature via WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram that shows your POV from the Meta Ray-Ban Display’s camera. This obviously is not an ideal way to video chat, but if you’re trying to show someone something, it could be useful. I’m not really sure how the Meta Ray-Ban Display would ever overcome the fact that there’s not a camera pointed at your face for a more natural video calling experience, either. A Meta-made version of Apple’s spatial Personas in the Vision Pro, maybe? I certainly hope they’d be more high-res than its Horizon Worlds avatars.
I tried video calling my partner through Instagram to test the feature out, and the results were… low-res. To make sure, I compared the quality to the same thing from my iPhone 17 just to make sure it wasn’t just Instagram, and it looks like the camera resolution on the Meta Ray-Ban Display was the issue, since the video quality from my iPhone looked much clearer. For lots of reasons, I don’t think this is a feature I’d be using much.
In addition to calling and messaging, there’s also navigation, which Meta says is still in beta. I used the Meta Ray-Ban Display’s navigation feature to do some walking in New York, and it was decent. I even used dictation to actually enter the address I was headed to, and it worked on a busy sidewalk in Times Square. Having turn-by-turn navigation glued to your eyeball like that isn’t always going to be useful, but in certain situations, it can be, and walking through Times Square definitely felt like one of them. Sure, I could have pulled out my phone just as easily, but there was something more freeing about being able to just glance down at the map on my face to make sure I was headed the right way. It also freed up my hand to use my phone to double-check the address was right, which felt a little dystopian in some ways to be screen maxing like that.
Meta does offer a zoomed-in and zoomed-out view inside the UI, which is good if you’re moving fast and need to see ahead, which could be useful on a bike. Right now, when I’m using a bike share and I want to make sure I’m going the right way, I usually pull over to the curb and check my phone, which is not ideal. Meta even went as far as to integrate some non-essential map features into navigation on the Meta Ray-Ban Display, too, including tabs that help you search for cafes, restaurants, parks, and “attractions.” Meta is pulling that information, according to a helpful information tab in the maps app, from sources like OpenStreetMap, which offers publicly accessible map data.
Another nice-to-have feature you might be interested in is live captions as well as live translations, which are exactly what they sound like. Live captions uses the microphones in the smart glasses to hear your surroundings and then captions them in real-time on the display, while translation does the same thing while converting one language to another. I tested both, and the live captions works fairly well, while the latter… well, you’ll find out.
Live captions kept up with a fairly fast-paced YouTube video, and while it didn’t nail all of the words 100 percent, the broad strokes were all in place. If you’re hard of hearing or have an impairment, I can see live captions being useful, granted you’re in an environment where you can pick up sound okay. One thing that’s impressive is the Meta Ray-Ban Display’s ability to know when the wearer is talking and then not captioning that speech. This is, however, also a downside sometimes in real conversations, because oftentimes two people may overlap in vocalizing, and this causes Meta AI to miss what your conversation partner said in an effort not to capture your voice in the caption.
Similarly, live translation works, but with some variability. I tested live translation in a conversation with my partner, who is bilingual (she speaks English and Spanish), and like live captions, it superimposes the translated text of your speaking partner onto the screen in real time. The only problem is, when I read back the translated text to confirm that it was correct, my partner frequently reported it being slightly off. It’s not that the meaning was wrong, per se (though sometimes it was), but the translated text, when ported over to English, was translated but not interpreted, if you catch my meaning. That’s to say the words were mostly correct, but it wasn’t rephrased to fit English grammar, making reading and understanding the conversation touch-and-go at points.
These hiccups are bound to happen in any translation app out there, and Meta AI is no different, but I wouldn’t say I was wowed at its acumen. That being said, I can see this feature coming in handy if you had to use it while traveling, if just because looking at the translation in your smart glasses screen is more natural than looking down at a phone. Google Translate is still more refined, but looking down and to the right in your smart glasses is marginally better than looking at your phone. If you do need to look at a phone, all of the translated text appears in the Meta AI app, so it can be easily referenced.
One other minor gripe with live translation is that each time you want to switch languages, you have to go into the Meta AI app and download that language onto the smart glasses, which takes a couple of minutes (and that’s on my home Wi-Fi, not LTE). It’s not a huge deal, and you probably won’t be switching a ton between languages, but if you’re visiting a country where multiple languages are frequently spoken, it could get kind of annoying.
There are still touch controls on the arm if you need them. @ Raymond Wong / Gizmodo
There are other apps that I’ll get into later (camera and photos), but right now, those are your main features. And when I say “main features,” what I mean is they’re the only features you’re going to get. There is no app store here, which means if you were excited to be able to doomscroll through TikTok on the Meta Ray-Ban Display, you’re out of luck. There is no Gmail. There is no Slack. And it’s not just third-party apps; there’s no proper Instagram or Facebook app, either. This, to me, seems like an odd choice given some other smart glasses out there with fewer resources manage to do a lot more. Even Inmo’s Air 3, which are otherwise not a good pair of smart glasses on a hardware level, have the Google Play Store and let you download pretty much any app and use it in 2D.
It’s deflating to an extent to spend $800 on a future-forward device and then find that the future can’t run even a pared-down version of Instagram. I can only assume that will change at some point, but I don’t have a crystal ball, and can only review the Meta Ray-Ban Display as it is right now. And what it is right now is a pair of smart glasses with an impressive display that you can’t do a ton with.
Time for (neural) band practice
I think what gets lost in the hype of a bright and shiny screen inside Meta’s Ray-Ban Display is the screen’s companion, the Neural Band. One of the biggest hurdles to developing a functional pair of smart glasses with a screen in them is figuring out how exactly you should be controlling the UI that the screen displays. Meta’s solution is a pretty magical wearable called the Neural Band, which uses electromyography (EMG) sensors to detect electrical activity in your muscles and nerves and then translates that activity into inputs.
To control the Meta Ray-Ban Display, you use a series of tiny gestures. For scrolling, make a fist and then move your thumb over the top to navigate left, right, up, or down, to select apps, scroll, etc… To select, you pinch your thumb and index finger together once. Going back is a single pinch of your middle finger and thumb, while a double-tap of those two digits can wake the screen or put it to sleep, and a long middle finger pinch brings up a quick menu for going home and going to apps. There’s also a double-tap gesture with your thumb on your fist that activates Meta AI, if you don’t want to use the wake command, “Hey Meta.” Every time the Neural Band registers an input, it gives you a nice little haptic buzz to tell you it’s working.
The Neural Band is surprisingly quick at reading your inputs, though there are most likely times when you will have to send an input twice. The accuracy also has a lot to do with whether the band is strapped in tight enough, so if you’re having trouble, try making it a little tighter. Also, if you’re wearing the Neural Band all day, you can expect some accidental inputs, though I didn’t find this to be a huge issue. A couple of times here and there while I was typing, the Neural Band registered my finger motions as an input, but for the most part, it was reliable and steady.
The band itself doesn’t have much to it; it’s a piece of cloth with plastic sensors inside that you slip on and then strap to your wrist just like you would a fitness band from Whoop or Polar. While it doesn’t look like much on the surface, it’s made from a fairly high-tech material called Vectran, which is used on the crash pads of the Mars Rover and is soft but strong. The band itself has 18 hours of battery and a magnetic charging cable, and an IPX7 rating, which means it can be submerged in 1 meter of water for up to 30 minutes without ingress. (Full disclosure: I did not test the band’s water resistance for fear of damaging it, so dunk it at your own risk.)
To me, it’s all as cool as it sounds. Being able to control smart glasses this way is novel, and companies are still figuring out the best input method (smart rings are also hot right now), but this is my favorite so far in terms of user experience. With that said, it’s also a wristband. I previously wrote that making people put on a wristband to use their smart glasses is a big ask, and I still mostly stick by that statement. Whether the process is difficult or not, wearing the band for long periods can get a little irksome.
The Neural Band leaves a mark on your arm afterward from the sensors pressing into your flesh, and sometimes it has to be strapped on fairly tight to work properly, which isn’t ideal for those of us who can get the ick from wearing something on our wrist all day (this is why I don’t wear watches of any kind). In a world of fitness bands and smartwatches, the Neural Band looks banal enough, but I am unconvinced that this is the solution to navigating glasses UI. My guess? This band is going straight in the trash when smart glasses makers figure out how to fit hand and eye tracking into the frames themselves. Oh, and speaking of the trash, don’t accidentally throw your Neural Band out or lose it; that’ll cost you $199 for a replacement.
The Neural Band is gonna leave a mark. @Raymond Wong / Gizmodo
Despite those downsides, the Neural Band is impressive overall, but I should warn you that misusing it can have dire consequences. My first word of advice: make sure you put the band on correctly. While testing the Meta Ray-Ban Display, I accidentally put the band on backwards since knowing which way is which can be confusing at first (just make sure the button of the top sensor is facing you). The result, obviously, was incorrect inputs, which, no big deal, right? Wrong. Don’t forget, the Meta Ray-Ban Display is connected to your phone, and because of that, I accidentally, somehow, ended up taking a picture and sending it to a friend of mine by accident. Luckily, everything was PG. Crisis averted, but it also could have made for a very awkward situation.
If that idea sends a shiver down your spine, my word of advice would be to practice with your Neural Band for a few days before you connect your phone, so by the time you’re ready to start zooming around, you can do so with a reasonable degree of certainty that you won’t accidentally give your Aunt Debra an eyeful.
How does the future feel?
One thing you should be very aware of when you’re choosing a pair of smart glasses is how they look, but also how they feel on your face. Again, these are $800 smart glasses, and to get your money’s worth, you’re probably going to want to wear them for fairly long periods of time. And if you’re wearing them for long periods of time, they need to not destroy your nose. Mostly, the Meta Ray-Ban Display were comfortable during longer periods of use, though they are objectively heavier than non-display models. The Meta Ray-Ban Display are 69g (70g for the larger size) compared to the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2, which are 52g.
The Meta Ray-Ban Display aren’t just heavier, they’re also thicker. You can see that the frames are a great deal thicker than Meta’s screenless smart glasses. Though, thanks to the acumen of EssilorLuxottica in designing the Meta Ray-Ban Display, I think they’re stylish on most faces. Don’t get me wrong, they make most people look like Nerds (capital N intentional) or Brooklyn hipsters from 2004, but compared to other smart glasses with screens, they’re stylish and comfortable for the most part.
The style choices are limited right now, which is a bit of a bummer since the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses (the ones without a screen) come in lots of different styles. Right now, the Meta Ray-Ban Display only come in Black or Sand, and both of those finishes are shiny instead of matte, which is not really my first preference when it comes to Ray-Bans, both because I don’t love the look and they attract fingerprints a lot easier.
One thing that I love this time around is the case, which is black and has the same pleather material as the ones for the Ray-Ban Meta AI Gen 1 and 2, but can be collapsed to lie flat, which is great for when you want to slip it into your pocket. That’s a bigger perk than you might think, since these are very expensive smart glasses that you’re going to want to take care of when you remove them from your face by putting them back in the case. I wouldn’t plan on repairs for scratches or damage on these smart glasses being cheap or easy, if you can even get them repaired at all.
As long as we’re talking about wearing the Meta Ray-Ban Display for long periods, we should talk about battery life, too. There’s a new battery in all of Meta’s 2025 smart glasses (the same battery in the Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses and the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2), and it pays off the same way it does in the non-display versions. After a full day’s worth of intermittent use, including about an hour of audio playback, messaging, navigation, and more, starting at about 10:30 a.m., the Meta Ray-Ban Display (which started with a full charge) were at about 18% by the time I got home at 8 p.m.
For me, that feels more than sufficient, though I guess that depends on how much of a smart glasses junkie you are. Charging the Meta Ray-Ban Display is basically the same as always. You just slide them in between the arms inside the case so that the bridge rests on top, and the charging case will do the rest. You’ll get up to 50% charge in about 20 minutes, and the case holds 30 hours of battery in total.
How you think the Meta Ray-Ban Display looks will be subjective, but you should be prepared for a little more heft than screenless versions, even if EssilorLuxottica does a good job of making that extra size work for the smart glasses.
Cameras, speakers, and Meta AI
There are some aspects of the Meta Ray-Ban Display that are somewhat unchanged from the screenless Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1 and 2. The audio is as solid as ever, both for calls and music playback, which is great since using the smart glasses for voice calls is still one of my favorite uses. Pictures are… fine. I was a bit disappointed to find that the Meta Ray-Ban Display doesn’t have the 3K 60 fps capability that the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 and Oakley Vanguard glasses have, and instead maxes out at 1440p at 30 fps.
There’s also the same 12-megapixel sensor as the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1 and Gen 2, which gives it similar video and picture capture. While shooting with the Meta Ray-Ban Display, I was underwhelmed. For $800, it would have been nice to see an improvement here, but you’re probably buying these smart glasses for the screen, anyway. If you want a more in-depth camera analysis, read our original Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1 review; it’s the same camera hardware, and as a longtime owner of those smart glasses, I can tell you that the results in the Meta Ray-Ban Display are about the same.
What is new on the camera front is that you can get a real-time viewfinder of what you’re looking at in the display, which is nice. To take a picture, you just open the camera app via your preferred methods (voice or selecting it using the UI) and then pinch your index finger and thumb to get snapping. One cool twist here (no pun intended) is that you can zoom using the Neural Band by pinching your index finger and thumb and then twisting your wrist counterclockwise to zoom in. There’s a very simple photo app where you can look at all the pics and vids you snapped, too, and you can send them to people from this menu as well.
Meta AI works the same as it does on previous generations of glasses, though you get a pop-up circle in the Meta Ray-Ban Display that tells you when Meta AI is activated and thinking. It works fine for simple voice commands like “take a picture” and “launch Spotify,” but uses the same AI models as other generations, so more complex tasks like “what am I looking at?” or “what kind of flower is this?” can be hit or miss. AI is still one of the least compelling parts of Meta’s smart glasses, despite the company’s emphasis on that front. I would like to see Meta focus on making a smoother voice assistant over computer vision capabilities, but that’s also a very tough nut to crack. Just ask Google, Amazon, and Apple, which have been trying for like a decade now.
As always, there’s the Meta AI app, which shoves annoying AI content in your face that I could do without, but if you’re going to use these smart glasses, you’ll have to make peace with that. In fact, there are quite a few things you might have to make peace with if you’re going to use the Meta Ray-Ban Display.
Rose-tinted smart glasses?
There were some things I expected to feel while wearing the Meta Ray-Ban Display, and some things I didn’t. One thing I expected to feel was a little distracted. Turns out I was right. In theory, smart glasses with screens in them could be less all-consuming than phones, but in practice, I just don’t think that pans out. Sure, you don’t have access to apps and all of the things that keep your head glued to a screen, but notifications are also distracting, and even more so when they’re plastered on your eyeballs. There is something that happens when you bring your body and your eyes that close to a screen, and I’m not sure I like what that something is. Which brings me to the next thing I felt, though unexpectedly this time: worried.
Putting on Meta’s smartest glasses had me feeling surprisingly introspective and a little douchey. On one hand, zooming around a screen floating before your eyes while using just one hand is cool, but on the other, it’s a little depressing. Is the novelty worth the hit to your distraction? Is it worth the implications on your privacy or the privacy of people around you? Is it worth wondering, as you’re walking around like a screen-zombie, staring at the ground, if people think you’re a total tool? That’s a personal thing that you’ll have to decide for yourself, but they’re questions worth asking, and it’s better to ask them now, before it’s too late.
And maybe I’m blowing things out of proportion. Maybe we won’t have to reconcile any of those questions. Maybe this whole smart glasses thing will fall flat on its face, and that will be that; just glowing rectangles in our hands from here on out. That’s a possible future, but one that I sincerely doubt. With companies like Google, Apple (reportedly), and Samsung all waiting in the wings to launch their own versions of the Meta Ray-Ban Display, I’m willing to wager we haven’t seen the last of the smart glasses boom, which means we’re going to have to make some decisions.
So, what say you: are smart glasses the future? Or are they just a one-way ticket to glasshole 2.0?
But just because putting gadgets into furniture is fun doesn’t mean it’s straightforward. Figuring out how to combine tech and furniture comes with a difficult balancing act. You have to account for properly cleansing air in someone’s apartment, but also… acting as a tasteful surface for a glass of orange juice? They’re silly and self-inflicted challenges, but when they’re met properly, they’re kind of neat. And when they don’t? Well, we’ll get into that in a moment…
DecorTech Round Bluetooth Speaker End Table
This speaker table sounds fine and has lots of features, but speaker end tables shouldn’t exist.
Sounds decent
Has a built-in wireless charger
Radio!
End tables are a bad vessel for speakers
Cheap materials
The ultimate end table?
My most recent foray into smart furniture was the DecorTech Bluetooth Speaker End Table, which is exactly what it sounds like; it’s an end table that doubles as a Bluetooth speaker. The design is nothing special (there’s no Ikea-like Scandinavian attention to detail here), but it’s inoffensive enough to blend into most living rooms without looking cobbled together. Out of context, you might think it’s an electric drum or something, but next to a couch, the picture comes together.
Where the table’s masquerade as just a banal piece of furniture comes to an end (no pun intended) is when you take a gander at the top. Here, you’ll see a black surface with an array of buttons, including a power button, an FM scan button, and a play/pause button, as well as volume up and down buttons. These, as you may already know, are not in regular tables.
I’ll be honest, I was pleasantly surprised by the selection of buttons, and while volume up/down on a hardware level isn’t necessary, since most people are just going to use their phones to control volume, it’s still nice to have. Even nicer is the inclusion of a radio, in my opinion. Call me an old man (not so loud, please; it’s past my bedtime), but I love listening to the radio, and tuning in from my phone just doesn’t feel the same, even if it’s technically more convenient. A Bluetooth end table, though? That somehow feels appropriate in the arbitrary spectrum of gadgets I’ve deemed acceptable to have a radio in.
If there’s one pretty ugly downside to the whole FM radio thing, it’s that the DecorTech Bluetooth Speaker End Table includes an FM antenna extension, which is actually just a long cable that drapes off the back. I guess it could be useful if you need to position the antenna for a better signal, but I’m not really sure how you’re supposed to do that. Tape it to the wall? Run it under the rug? Stick it to the window with a piece of bubble gum? The choice is odd, and the disheveled vibe it brings to the table is even odder.
Another surprise inclusion in this table is a wireless charger, which is indicated by a symbol plastered in the middle of the table. There’s not much to say about the wireless charging in this case, but it does work, and if you like to be by your phone at all times like I do, it’s really convenient being able to just slap that glass rectangle down and (very slowly at 10W) charge it up. If wireless isn’t your thing, you can also charge wired via the built-in USB-A port. No USB-C here, sorry, literally everyone.
All of this, of course, is just an accoutrement to the real star of the show: Bluetooth audio. This is a speaker table after all, and if you’re buying one of these things (or thinking about it), you’re going to want it to sound serviceable. And luckily, if a speaker-clad end table is high on your priority list, I have good news. The DecorTech Bluetooth Speaker End Table sounds pretty alright, though with one crucial flaw that I’ll get into in a sec.
The speakers, while not exactly hi-fi, did a much better job than I expected for a $115 table that can be ordered from Walmart. I played music through Spotify on my phone, including some ambient and some jazz tunes, and it handled songs admirably. On folky singer-songwriter-y tracks from MJ Lenderman, I was less impressed, as vocals took a little too prominent of a place in the mix, but instrumental music is where things felt more cohesive, with mids and highs meshing well with lows.
Inside, there’s a 6.5-inch subwoofer and a 2-inch speaker, so there’s not a huge sound, but there’s probably more than you’d expect from a speaker that’s also an end table, wireless charger, and a radio. You’re not going to get the same quality audio as you would on a dedicated Bluetooth speaker from Bose or even a nice soundbar from Sonos or a comparable brand, but as a secondary audio device that you maybe only plan on using sometimes, it’s still decent. That is, if you can hear it properly…
Let’s table that idea
Now, remember earlier in this review when I was talking about the constraints of putting gadgets into other gadgets? Yeah, well, turns out the DecorTech Bluetooth Speaker End Table is kind of a perfect example. Speakers, as we all know, need to be positioned properly, since audio is a very spatial thing. This is why, generally speaking, most people’s main home theater systems or hi-fi audio setups put the bulk of the audio in front of the listener. Sure, you might have surround sound speakers flanking you as you watch something, but those aren’t doing the heavy lifting. You probably see where this is going.
An end table is (say it with me now) at the end. That means the audio, if you were to place the DecorTech Bluetooth Speaker End Table next to your couch, like a lot of people would, is coming from the side as you’re listening. There’s nothing ideal about that placement, and while it might not bother everyone, it will most definitely bother people who want to hear their speaker properly. Having listened to the speaker from both positions (sitting to the side and sitting in front), I can tell you that there is definitely a difference in the clarity of audio you’re getting. I suppose you could always reposition the speaker to the front of your couch, of course, but that’s not totally ideal either.
For one, this end table is an end table, both in name and in height, which means it’s meant to sit at an ideal level relative to the arm of a couch, so you can place things on it, like your phone or that cup of tea you’re going to forget about by accident until it goes cold. Because of the height, putting the speaker in front of your couch just looks weird, and that’s not even taking into account that it also does a bad job of hiding the power cable, which, as we all know, is bad for decor.
The worst part is, there’s really no way of getting around this fact, which kind of punches a hole in the entire conceit of having an end table with a speaker in it in the first place. The reality is, if you’re buying a speaker/end table, you’re just going to have to be okay with poorly positioned audio. That being said, if you do have some kind of setup in your home where you think you’ll have an end table that faces you, I guess this end table could work? Then again, if your end table is halfway across the room, it’s not really much of an end table, is it? Also, you can kiss the convenience of the wireless charger and buttons goodbye.
Listen, I’m not here to rain on anyone’s parade; as I said previously, furniture with tech in it is kind of cool. I admittedly am a sucker for what Ikea does in this space, and even if it’s expensive and unnecessary, I can’t help but want it anyway. And you know what? Sometimes there’s even real ingenuity in tech-laden furniture. Heck, maybe you live in a micro apartment in Tokyo, and you simply don’t have room for a coffee table and an air purifier in one place.
However frivolous it may seem, there’s a right and a wrong way to shove gadgets into stuff, and the wrong way is doing it in a way that ignores the function of both things you’re mashing together. A coffee table air purifier? Okay. A speaker lamp? Fine. These are things that coexist. But there’s a start and an end to where that mashing works, and the end, for me at least, is this decent but ill-conceived end table.
The new Nest Cam Indoor and Nest Cam Outdoor boast the easiest setup experience I’ve encountered. Simply plug them in (the Nest Cam Indoor comes with a 10-foot USB-C cable, the Nest Cam Outdoor has an 18-foot weatherproof cable), scan the QR code sticker on the front of each camera with the Google Home app, connect to Wi-Fi, and you’re up and running in no time (both support 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz bands). The elegant magnetic mount for the Nest Cam Outdoor needs a couple of screws, while my Nest Cam Indoor is perched neatly on a shelf.
While Google has lagged behind competitors for years with its 1080p cameras, support for HDR and a high frame rate helped keep the last-gen Nest cams relevant. That said, the jump to a 2560 x 1400 resolution with a wider 152-degree diagonal field of view is a clear and immediate upgrade. This resolution bump also enables 6X digital zoom, so the Nest Cams can serve up notifications that zoom in on the subject of each animated alert. These notifications show a few frames of each event, making it far easier to decide whether you need to tap through and watch the full video. You can also zoom in on the live feed and crop the view to stay focused on a specific area, like a garden gate or path.
Google Home via Simon Hill
Google Home via Simon Hill
Both cameras detect more activity and alert more accurately and swiftly than their predecessors. The range seems to be better, too. For example, my indoor camera faces a side door, and it can pick up people across the street and zoom in on them as they walk by. I don’t necessarily want it to do that, but the reach is impressive. It’s more successful with the outdoor camera, as only the newer model picks up on me entering the back door of the distant garage compared to the prior generation. The outdoor camera is also far faster to alert and upload accessible video than the old battery-powered model (this is generally true for wired cameras).
The cameras get six hours of cloud video history at no extra cost (up from three for the previous generation), but that’s your allotment without an expensive subscription. On that note, Google has killed off Nest Aware in favor of the two-tier Google Home Premium: Standard is $10 per month or $100 per year, and Advanced is $20 per month or $200 per year.
Google’s Home Premium subscriptions include everything you got with Nest Aware (30 days of video history, Familiar Faces, and garage door, package, smoke and CO alarm detection) and Nest Aware Plus (60 days of video history or 10 days of 24/7), but Standard also includes Gemini Live on compatible smart speakers and displays, and the option to create automations by typing what you want in the Home app. This last feature works well if you have a bunch of smart home devices set up in Google Home, and you can tell it to do things like “turn on the lights at sunset” or “have the side door camera trigger the outside lights.” It’s far easier than using the old script editor.
Advanced AI
The cream of the AI goodies requires the Advanced subscription. This adds descriptive notifications, so instead of “person detected,” you get messages like “person walks up stairs” or “cat is on the table” instead of “animal detected.” The searchable video history using the Ask Home search bar is genuinely handy; you can ask questions like “who opened the back door last night?” or “Did FedEx deliver a package today?” and jump straight to the event. You also get daily summaries with Home Brief, giving you an often weirdly comical digest of highlights from the day.
Guys, I’m trying. Right now, as I type these words, I am trying on multiple levels. Trying to understand, trying to be fair, and I’m trying really, really hard to breathe through my nostrils, given the enormous weight of our AR glasses future resting uncomfortably on my nose.
The thing is, you shouldn’t need to try hard to justify wearing AR smart glasses. Any pair that doesn’t just work is dead on arrival. I want the future, and the AR glasses that come with it. but unfortunately, with the $900 Inmo Air 3, trying is the best I’m going to get, and that, dear reader, is what I’d call a major drag.
Inmo Air 3
The Inmo Air 3 AR smart glasses should be avoided at all costs.
The screen can be sharp when you actually see it
Lots of cool ideas (in theory)
Bad fit on my face made the screen hard to see
The smart ring doesn’t work as promised
Bad build quality; parts started to break
A lot of money for something that doesn’t work
Aggravating in almost every way possible
Inm-oh my God, please help
Let’s start from the top. Inmo is a Chinese purveyor of smart glasses that recently launched its Inmo Air 3 via Kickstarter, a pair of Android-powered AR glasses that tout a few enticing ideas and features. One of those selling points is a full-color screen that is 1080p, and the other is a novel input method for navigating UI inside the glasses using a smart ring. Both of those ideas caught my attention during IFA 2025, which is why I chose to write about them in September. Those features, coupled with the fact that you can run pretty much any app in 2D by just downloading it from the Google Play Store via the glasses UI felt like they could be a winning combo.
But in the world of gadgets, there are hits, and there are misses, and then there are complete and total whiffs, and the latter category is where Inmo’s Air 3 smart glasses fall for me, and the problems started almost immediately out of the box.
Before we get to my list of grievances, I’ll start with a small positive, which is that the packaging is impressive, and so is the selection of stuff that comes with the smart glasses. In addition to the smart glasses, there’s a touch-sensitive ring with multiple buttons, a garage door-like touch controller if you don’t feel like using that, a magnetic cable for charging the ring, and magnetically attachable shades for when you want more contrast. That’s a lot of stuff, which is welcome, but that’s where the positive impressions stopped for me, because the first thing that jumped out when I put the smart glasses on was… I couldn’t see anything.
I quickly discovered that it wasn’t a problem with the waveguide display inside the smart glasses; it was actually an issue with how they sit on my face. Like some other folks out there, I have a bump on my nose, which is a polite way of saying I have a big schnoz. Because of that, I have to wear glasses closer to my face (resting above the bump in my nose) as opposed to in the middle, where other folks might wear them. On one hand, that’s a physical thing specific to me. On the other hand, I am not the only person out there with a nose like this.
Because of the way the Inmo Air 3 sit on my face, I actually can’t see two-thirds of the display when the smart glasses are in a comfortable, natural position on my nose. So, in order to see the full screen, I have to move them down my nose to where the smart glasses (and the nose pads) actually press my nostrils in, making it hard to, um… breathe. It’s really, incredibly, almost laughably not fun. And before you ask—no, you cannot adjust the position of a single screen on your face to fix it, and these smart glasses are far from lightweight, so, to avoid mouth-breathing for extended periods, I decided to test them out by holding them in the strange, unnatural position on my face that I could see best in. I did feel justified when two of my other colleagues put the Inmo Air 3 on and reported that the screen is faint and difficult to make out, so I’m not the only one. “They hurt my eyes,” was the exact first impression of Gizmodo Senior Editor of Consumer Tech, Raymond Wong, when he put them on.
Needless to say, that’s not a great start, but it gets worse.
I will not be putting a ring on it
As I mentioned, one of the things I was most excited about was the inclusion of a smart ring for controlling the UI inside the smart glasses. It’s a pretty clever method for input that I haven’t yet tried, and felt (on the surface) like something that could catch on if executed properly. I say if here because novel hardware is a lot harder to make than it sounds on paper, and there’s always a chance that it doesn’t work right. And boy, does Inmo’s ring (called the Ring 3) not work right.
The Ring 3, which connects to the Inmo Air 3 smart glasses via Bluetooth, has quite a bit of latency, which makes using it a little aggravating. While I got more adept the longer I used it, the touch surface is rather small, and combined with the lag, I found it to be imprecise at best. Nah, let’s be honest, it was a nightmare. Luckily, though, I was relieved from having to use the Ring 3 fairly quickly. While attempting to adjust the size by bending the plastic part that wraps around your finger (this is how the ring is intended to be resized), it started to break, separating from the hard plastic where all the touch-sensitive hardware and buttons live. Not realizing, I attempted to adjust even further (I wasn’t applying Hulk-like force here, I promise), and it started to crack.
So, that was that for the ring for me. I couldn’t resize it to fit properly on my finger without breaking it further, so I did the rest of my testing using a combination of the Inmo Air 3’s touch-sensitive surface on the right side of the smart glasses (similar to how Meta’s Ray-Bans work) and the garage door remote-like controller that I mentioned earlier. The latter worked fine, but it feels incredibly cheap and is far from perfect.
I wouldn’t describe the touchpad on the front of the device, where you use your thumb to direct a cursor, as being super responsive, but it gets the job done. You’ll wind up having to tap things multiple times to register a “click” in the UI, but I suppose it’s better than trying to use a broken smart ring if just by virtue of the fact that it technically works. There are some physical buttons on the non-ring touch controller that allow you to go back, go home, control the volume, and pull up the camera, which is nice if you get tired of not having your taps registered.
And if both those controllers fail, there are touch and tap controls on the right arm of the smart glasses and volume buttons on the left arm.
But what about that 1080p display?
Once I was able to navigate the Inmo Air 3 properly, I could start actually using them. That, in theory, should have been the exciting part, but the highs weren’t exactly what I would call soaring. First, there was the irksome part of getting the AR smart glasses online, which I had to do entirely through the Inmo UI. While there is an Inmo app for iOS and Android, my app wouldn’t register the smart glasses and connect, so any added functionality through the app was unusable. So, to enter Wi-Fi credentials, I had to select my network in the Air 3 and painstakingly punch in passwords one character at a time using the garage door remote. I managed to do that without giving up, luckily, and was able to download some apps in the Google Play Store.
The first place I went was YouTube, where I loaded up some cooking content. The experience was pretty nice, though I definitely wish the smart glasses weren’t crushing my nose while I was watching. I could see, on someone whose face fits the smart glasses, that watching things could be enjoyable in the Inmo Air 3, if not altogether groundbreaking. Sure, the Inmo Air 3 are more lightweight than a VR headset, but they’re nowhere near as immersive as watching in a Quest 3 and much less premium than an Apple Vision Pro, though that’s admittedly a tough comparison.
I also downloaded TikTok and scrolled through some videos for good measure, and that experience was also fine, though I can’t say it was preferable to just pulling out my phone and zoning out that way. The screen is definitely the strongest part of the Inmo Air 3; it’s sharp, and watching content feels surprisingly hi-fi given it’s just some waveguides displays shoved into a pair of glasses. The brightness isn’t the best, though. While Meta’s Ray-Ban Display tops out at an impressive 5,000 nits of brightness and works well in full natural light, the Inmo Air 3 reaches just 600 nits. Even just using the AR smart glasses in my office on a sunny day was enough to kill contrast, though a magnetic attachment that gives the lenses shade does help. But, to be honest, that’s not the only reason I wouldn’t wear Inmo’s Air 3 outside…
Not the look I’m looking for
If you saw Inmo’s Air 3 in renderings like I did and thought, “those look like smart glasses I could wear on the subway,” you may want to think again. The Air 3 are big smart glasses. The frames are thick, which is bad for someone like me who has a relatively small head, though even if you don’t look as dumb as I do when you wear them, you might feel dumb just because of the weight. The big lenses also don’t pass for normal glasses, and there’s a non-zero chance someone might assume you have a visual impairment if you walk around with them on.
I think what’s more aggravating about the size is the fact that battery life doesn’t seem to be particularly great. After every session (about 20 to 30 minutes), I felt like I should charge the Inmo Air 3 up since a significant chunk of the battery was gone. While Inmo doesn’t offer official battery life estimates, there’s a 660mAh battery on board, and in my estimate, you can expect between 1.5 to 2 hours max with continuous use. That’s not great, obviously, but all of that 1080p goodness is going to come at a cost.
If you’re not bringing the smart glasses outside with you, it kind of renders some features useless, like the ability to take pictures. That’s mostly okay, though, because I took some snaps with the Inmo Air 3 and they were not very high-res. While it technically has a higher megapixel camera than the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1 and Gen 2 (the Air 3 has a 16-megapixel sensor, and Meta’s smart glasses have a 12-megapixel sensor), the quality somehow looks worse.
Inmo’s Air 3 seem kind of stuck in a liminal space between display-free smart glasses and thicker AR smart glasses like Snapchat’s Spectacles. Clearly, Inmo thinks this is a product you’d want to walk around with on your face, based on its marketing, but in practice, they still feel like a stay-at-home gadget due to the not-so-great battery life, the chunky size, and the general lack of convenience. Maybe your level of comfort with them will vary, but from where I’m sitting, style is not the Inmo Air 3’s strong suit. In fact, I don’t know that a strong suit exists…
Good ideas that don’t come together at all
There’s more that you can do with these smart glasses, but unfortunately, I wasn’t really able to test it all because of the hiccups with the hardware. One area that I would have liked to test was cloud gaming, since the idea of being able to play on a big virtual screen (like you can do in a Meta Quest 3) is kind of awesome. I wasn’t able to really do that, though, since the Inmo Air 3 don’t sit properly on my face, and I basically had to hold them up with one hand while I tested. And as we all know, holding a typical controller historically requires two hands.
There’s also a multi-window mode where you can have up to three different windows open simultaneously, but that mode requires the use of the Ring 3, which as I’ve already established, was basically unusable for me. It’s a shame, in a lot of ways, that Inmo’s Air 3 is as rough as it is, because there are a lot of interesting ideas. I love the idea of a ring-based wearable (but it has to not crumble in your hands), being able to download any app and use it in 2D is freeing (but only if you can see the apps), and wearing the smart glasses around would be like having a real computer on your face (but you have to actually want to feel comfortable putting them on for that to work).
Unfortunately, for people interested in AR, the Inmo Air 3 just feel like more trouble than they’re worth. Yes, they’re a crowdfunded gadget, and you should expect some wonkiness from that category, but at $900 (that’s early bird pricing, the future MSRP is actually $1,100) I don’t think lack of polish to this degree is something anyone should put up with. If nothing else, It makes you appreciate the refinement of glasses like the Meta Ray-Ban Display, and even if they don’t do quite as much on paper. So, while I wouldn’t ever recommend paying for AR smart glasses like this, sometimes just knowing how bad things can get is its own kind of reward, and in the name of that crucial knowledge, I tortured my nose and face so you don’t have to.
To test the contrast however, I first listened to the speaker without its bass bottle. It’s very loud for a small speaker, and in my office I couldn’t cope with the volume turned up past 30 percent. It’s just not an enjoyable listen, sounding shrill and disappointing without any discernible bass. It’s not quite as bad as putting your old iPhone in a cup for extra amplification, but it’s not far off—and at least you can actually drink from the cup afterwards.
But we’re here for the bass-boosting bottle, and I can categorically say that the acoustically tuned plastic bottle does indeed boost the lower frequencies, and makes the speaker sound significantly better. The bottle takes the edge off the volume, and there’s a noticeable depth to the mids and bass once it’s attached. You can really hear the difference in the mix and balance, and the contrast between the sound with the bottle on and off is impressive.
Push the volume, however, and the bass gets muddy quickly, with the sharp edges once again noticeable in the mix. It’s not horrible, but compared to the competition it’s just not that enjoyable to listen to, which is a shame, because it sure does look cute on my desk.
While it is larger, the Anker Soundcore Motion 300 ($70) wipes the floor with the Sodapop, with clear bass and clarity, even at volume. Similarly, the Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 4 ($80) is small, portable, boasts full 360-degree sound and comes with IP67 waterproofing (it floats), which is a huge upgrade to Sodapop’s dust- and splash-resistant IPX65 rating.
Played side-by-side with the similarly proportioned and much cheaper $35 Tribit StormBox Micro 2 (IPX7 rating, 10 hours playtime), the physical separation and large chamber between the drivers and bass port does create a wider soundstage. There’s not much in it in terms of the amount of bass and overall performance though.
Boy, gaming headsets sure are getting expensive these days. There’s Sony’s Inzone H9 II, which costs $350, a sum that’s more than half the cost of a 1TB PlayStation with a disc drive. Then there are even more expensive options, like SteelSeries’ Arctis Nova Elite, which costs more than the aforementioned console at $600, though it does come with a separate hub. I’m not saying those gaming headsets don’t sound good—I tried the Inzone H9 II for myself and was impressed—but if you’re spending a several-hundred-dollar sum on a gaming headset (justaheadset for Pete’s sake), it better be game-changing.
That’s a high bar for a peripheral, to be sure, but one that I think resonates with most gamers willing to tread into the ultra-premium category. That being said, it’s a bar that can be met, as evidenced by Sony’s Inzone H9 II. Still, rising to the level of game-changing is no easy task, which is why I went into testing VZR’s Model One MKII Audiophile gaming headset with a raised eyebrow. With a $360 price tag, can the Model One MKII really deliver the goods at a level that makes the premium feel justified? The answer… is complicated.
VZR Model One MKII
The Model One MKII is an expensive headset that sounds good in moments but lacks modern conveniences.
Sounds good when set up the right way
Comfy
Feels sturdy
No option for Bluetooth or a 2.4GHz dongle
No active noise cancellation
Sounds mediocre when plugging into a Bluetooth controller
An “audiophile game headset”
Right out of the gate, VZR positions its Model One MKII as a gaming headset geared toward audiophiles. To back that claim up, it’s using something called CrossWave, the same technology in its previous headset, the MK One. CrossWave is a proprietary tech that is meant to more closely mimic the way sound naturally enters your ears. The idea here is that with precise acoustic tuning, it delivers more “natural” spatial audio that makes the headset ideal for first-person shooters, where hearing footfalls and other environmental noise can be make or break.
To augment that acoustic experience even further, VZR has included a “Talisman” in the Model One MKII, which is a patent-pending bass diffuser that, in VZR’s words, “brings tighter, harder-hitting lows that make every scenario feel massive.” That bass diffuser should also give you an indication as to where VZR intended to improve the sound in this iteration, which is to say, in the midrange frequencies. With less overpowering bass, you should be able to hear midranges and treble more easily.
So, that’s what VZR meant to do with the Model One MKII. The question is, does it actually achieve those goals? The answer? Sometimes yes and sometimes no. In my experience, the level of satisfaction with the Model One MKII depended largely on how I was using the headset. Using it the lazy way, which in my case is plugging directly into an Xbox controller (sometimes wired and sometimes not) and calling it a day, the gaming headset feels… lackluster. While I get a touch more spatiality while playing games like Fortnite, I wouldn’t describe the sound experience as groundbreaking. Footfalls and gunshots are perceptible, but not quite “wow, I’m right in the action” levels of sound.
Similarly, plugging into a PlayStation 5 DualSense controller and playing Gears of War is a fine experience, but it didn’t quite leave me feeling like spending $360 would be a good idea.
But this method isn’t the hi-fi way. If you’re buying this headset (spending nearly 400 freaking dollars to do so), you should think like an audiophile, and audiophiles don’t use Bluetooth like some regular-ass noob. Audiophiles take advantage of wires and the lossless audio they provide, in addition to the low latency. So, to test the headset like an audiophile would, I plugged the Model One MKII into Steel Series’ Arctis Nova Elite gaming hub, which is basically a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that is meant to maximize sound quality and precision. The result was a marked improvement in sound quality and overall satisfaction with VZR’s hardware. Gears of War: Reloadedsounded a hell of a lot more immersive, with more spatiality and much higher fidelity sound—rock crumbling felt proximate, and enemies felt like they were in the room.
Is it cheating to use a DAC? I don’t know; you tell me. Maybe it is, but I also imagine most people spending nearly $400 on a headset will have a proper setup at home to use said hi-fi headset, so in some ways, this feels like the better way to actually assess the Model One MKII’s audio chops. Ultimately, whether you feel satisfied with the Model One MKII’s sound quality will depend largely on your setup at home. If you’re taking the lazy approach and plugging this thing into a Bluetooth controller and calling it a day, beware. If you have the right interface to make the hardware sing, then it might be worth the investment.
Quality, but not always convenience
VZR’s Model One MKII brings quality in a lot of ways, and one of the areas you’ll notice immediately is the build. The Model One MKII feels sturdy, with a metal headstrap and a comfortable pleather band underneath that connects earcups made from heavy plastic. There’s a weight to the headset, but it doesn’t feel burdensome on your head, which means that it’s balanced well. Earcups, which contain memory foam, are also well-padded and comfortable in longer gaming sessions, though they don’t necessarily allow for the best heat dissipation.
Overall, the Model One MKII looks and feels like it’s worth several hundred dollars, which is good because it costs (checks notes)… several hundred dollars.
The mic quality also holds its own, according to people I gamed with, and is detachable, which is great if you’re storing the Model One MKII between gaming sessions or if you want to toss the headset in its included carrying case without crunching the mic. The mic also picks up my voice well, even when it’s not ideally positioned, which is good if you happen to bump your mic mid-game and don’t have time to fix it. The mic positioning also holds up well compared to cheaper gaming headsets with less rigidity.
There is one area that I have to take exception with, which is the fact that the headset is wired-only. For some people, that will be fine, and there’s no denying that wires provide unparalleled low latency and lossless audio, but I can’t help but feel like an option to use the headset with Bluetooth would be nice. I still think, despite the superiority of wires, that I prefer a dongle solution like Sony’s Inzone H9 II, which uses a 2.4GHz signal to transmit more audio information and cut down drastically on latency compared to regular Bluetooth connections. Sure, having to plug a dongle in and keep track of it isn’t ideal, but frankly, neither are wires, and the former solution looks a hell of a lot cleaner than dealing with all that black spaghetti on your desk.
Speaking of wires, the Model One MKII comes with revamped cables for more stability and better audio quality. I haven’t used the Model One that came before the MKII, so I don’t have much of a comparison, but I can tell you that the signal felt stable for the most part, though I did have some hiccups while plugged into my aging Xbox controller at home via Bluetooth. I’m going to give VZR the benefit of the doubt and say the signal instability was the controller’s fault, given the fact that the gaming headset operated fine when plugged into other controllers with less wear and tear.
So, back to the original question: should you really spend $360 on a gaming headset? It’s hard for me to answer that since I don’t have access to your last bank statement, but I think if you are going to spend that much, there are gaming headsets that I would spring for before the Model One MKII. Sony’s Inzone H9 II, for example, has quality sound in a dongle solution that feels a hell of a lot more convenient, and while it may not have the same premium build, it gives you even more features like active noise cancellation (ANC), which the Model One MKII lacks.
Also, Sony’s Inzone H9 II can be used wired via a 3.5mm cable if you really want to, so is there any real advantage to buying VZR’s Model One MKII? I’ll let you be the decider there, but if it were me spending almost $400 on a gaming peripheral, I’d want to have options. As high-quality as the Model One MKII can sound with the right setup, I find it a little too confining and not as full-featured as competitors that offer custom sound profiles, ANC, and options for wired/Bluetooth, while still bringing the A-game in the sound department. My advice? If you really feel like you need a premium headset, do yourself a favor and get one that does it all.
Speaking of critical listening, the XC1 work with Sony’s hi-res capable LDAC Bluetooth codec, should you happen to own a compatible Android phone (sorry, iPhone users). Using LDAC can reveal more detail, especially when listening to a source of lossless audio, but for these earbuds, I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze. Using LDAC disables your EQ settings and Bluetooth Multipoint, and the XC1 struggle to maintain a steady Bluetooth connection when LDAC is set to its highest-quality setting.
Baseus also includes two Dolby Audio modes (Music and Cinema), which are meant to create a more immersive, spatial experience. For me, it’s the opposite. I find they wash out the sound, with Cinema being downright muddy. At 60 percent volume, there was more than enough power for an engaging listening experience indoors. Outside, I needed a bit more oomph.
Beyond Music
Photograph: Simon Cohen
Calling on the Inspire XC1 is good. Whether indoors or outdoors, your callers will find it easy to understand you, and almost all background sounds are kept at bay. However, as with most clip-style open-ear earbuds, your voice won’t be crystal clear—some distortion does manage to creep in, particularly when outside.
Baseus rates battery life on the XC1 at eight hours per charge, with 40 hours of total use when you include the case’s battery, numbers that are only eclipsed by the OpenDots One’s 10/40 combo. Baseus assumes 50 percent volume and does not include the use of either Dolby Audio or LDAC. LDAC can be very power hungry, often reducing battery life by up to 30 percent, which is one more reason to avoid it.
Open-ear earbuds aren’t for everyone, but with great sound quality, a comfortable, clip-style design, and easy-to-use controls, the Baseus Inspire XC1 are an excellent choice. They check a lot of boxes for a price that’s considerably less than their nearest competitors, including strong water and dust resistance, optional LDAC mode, and Bluetooth Multipoint. The only thing that’s missing is support for Auracast. Sadly, that feature has yet to see widespread adoption. If you’re after an affordable pair of open buds that compete with the best, these are among the best we’ve tried.
