Huawei Eyewear II review
Our Verdict
As good-looking and unobtrusive as they are to wear, the Eyewear II are far too expensive to not offering better sound and more than features.
For
- Comfy and attractive
- Long battery life
- Good audio under certain conditions
Against
- Much more expensive than rivals
- Spotty playback quality
Tom's Guide Verdict
Every bit good-looking and unobtrusive as they are to wear, the Eyewear II are far too expensive to non offer amend audio and more features.
Pros
- +
Comfortable and attractive
- +
Long bombardment life
- +
Proficient sound under certain conditions
Cons
- -
Much more expensive than rivals
- -
Spotty playback quality
Smart glasses nevertheless don't feel like a must-have piece of tech yet, but the Huawei Eyewear II are a stiff attempt at proving that they are.
With the benefit of Huawei's excellent engineering and penchant for close integration betwixt its products, the Eyewear offer a unique culling to a pair of wireless earbuds, offer several identical features plus a few special abilities of its own cheers to a well fleshed-out companion app.
The Eyewear also gets the benefit of beingness a well-put-together product in a space with few competitors at the moment. Bated from the Amazon Echo Frames or the Bose Frames, other smart glasses are looking to provide a more characteristic-rich experience, whereas Huawei'due south glasses exercise fewer things, merely perform them all to a passing grade or meliorate.
However if you're weighing up buying a pair of these or some elevation-tier wireless earbuds, yous're likely to yet be better off plumping for the AirPods Pro or Galaxy Buds Pro. Even if yous're a Huawei acolyte, you'd likely be meliorate served past the FreeBuds 3. As this Eyewear II review will explain, you lot need to be a very specific kind of user, or in beloved with the idea of smart glasses generally, if yous want to purchase these expensive glasses.
Huawei X Gentle Monster Eyewear 2: Toll and availability
The Eyewear Two are piece of cake to option up the U.M. You can find them at the Huawei Store or on Amazon, Very or Currys. However with Huawei not welcome in the U.S., you'll need to go on a chase through auction sites to run across if there are pairs available to import.
Both designs of the Eyewear II cost £310, although buying them through Huawei lets you lot access special discounts for other accessories, plus a costless basic smartwatch too.
Huawei X Gentle Monster Eyewear II: Pattern
Huawei once again teamed upward with South Korean glasses maker Gentle Monster to design the second generation of its smart spectacles, and y'all can't deny they look good.
There are 2 versions of the Eyewear Ii bachelor: The rounder Myma or the narrower Lang (pictured). You can get either with polarized lenses, but at that place's besides the pick of prescription lenses in sure markets.
Whichever option you pick, they don't draw too much attention to themselves. The all-drinking glass front of the Lang specs certainly looks unique, merely not so much that they scream "smart glasses" at passers-by. In that location are no buttons on the sides, and the speaker grilles are hidden on the lesser border, and so it's only the thickness of the arms that give away that something's up.
The arms are fairly chonky compared to normal glasses, simply that'southward because you'll observe all the clever stuff within. Towards the lens on either side are touch sensors, which let y'all control things with taps, swipes and pinches. Behind them, sitting just over your ear, are the speakers.
Despite their size, the Eyewear are however comfy to wearable thank you to the contact points on your nose and ears being kept close to the proportions of a normal pair of glasses. They're light too, with the heavier Myma version weighing just ane.69 ounces (47.nine grams), which is a bear upon lighter than the equivalent Bose Frames' 1.76 ounces (49.89 grams) only only only.
The glasses live inside a black cuboid case, which with its pleasant-feeling leather and ii shiny zippers looks suitably fancy. It'due south not the most convenient shape to deport around though as a effect
Charging is prissy and uncomplicated since the instance is also its wireless charger. The case doesn't contain a battery however, and so yous'll demand to take the case plugged in for it to ability upwards the glasses. If, like me, yous're used to the cases for your earbuds besides acting every bit a mobile charging station, this is unintuitive, and defenseless me out a few times, leaving me with a pair of unresponsive spectacles. But it does mean that despite the case's size, it remains light.
Huawei X Gentle Monster Eyewear II: Audio
I didn't expect the Eyewear to be bad, but nor did I expect them to be quite as enjoyable as they are either. Everything comes out of the dual speakers with a bright clear sound, although at that place isn't a huge amount of bass.
Comparing the quality of Pharoah Sanders' "Y'all've Got to Have Freedom" on the Eyewear and the AirPods Pro, the overblown saxophone, elaborate piano and double bass sound richer on the earbuds. However the Eyewear offers one advantage in that its open pattern ways you lot go a surprisingly effective soundstage upshot. Sure yous tin can get stereo on whatever one-half-decent pair of 'buds, but you don't go the opportunity to hear exactly where in the room all the musicians were standing on many of them.
Watching an episode of Schitt's Creek proved less enjoyable. With but dialog playing, the limited effective range of the speakers becomes quite obvious. Information technology feels like y'all're listening to the Rose family deal with the town'southward peculiar goings-on from down the phone instead of right in the scene with them.
You lot won't want to employ the Eyewear for in-depth listening; the kind of time you put on your favorite album, sit downward in your comfiest chair and revel in all the details. You lot lose as well much detail compared to normal headphones. Instead, the Eyewear make for an excellent casual listening tool, when you're trying to do something else but want something in the background. This would exist meliorate from my perspective if they had prescription lenses in, since having the world look darker and out of focus isn't helpful for my productivity. However, I enjoyed being able to listen to a YouTube video while still beingness able to speak to my housemates equally they passed through the kitchen, and no dubiousness users with better eyesight would like it even more.
Withal, you won't want to listen to tracks in a particularly noisy environment. Not only is in that location no form of dissonance-canceling, but in that location'southward also nothing blocking your ears like there is with normal headphones, so you're going to be hearing the world as much equally your music. Even opening the windows of my sleeping accommodation/office to let in the sounds of nearby traffic was plenty to almost totally drown out the glasses playing a podcast at a reasonable book.
That's adept in some cases, say if you're walking to work and want to keep an ear out for traffic. This won't be good if you're trying to concentrate when you get there.
The microphones are weaker. I recorded a few voice notes with the Eyewear and my vox ever sounded afar and a trivial crackly. That was using the so-called Hard disk recording fashion of the glasses, a feature locked to Huawei phones, so I dread to remember what the normal quality mode sounds similar. Huawei mentions in its marketing textile that the Eyewear is an excellent tool for easily-free vlogging, only if I clicked on a YouTube video that sounded similar that, I'd be clicking off again very chop-chop.
Huawei X Gentle Monster Eyewear II: Condolement and controls
The Eyewear are wonderfully unobtrusive to wear. Perchance it'southward because I habiliment glasses anyway, but I did forget I was wearing them for long flow of fourth dimension until I moved from my desk and noticed that the sound came with me. That's not even praise I'd give to the AirPods Pro, which while comfy and well fitted, don't disappear from memory similar the Eyewear do.
Using the tap controls are nice and easy as well. Unlike other audio products where you have to learn where the sweet spot for making the touch controls work is, y'all can basically tap or swipe anywhere on the spectacles' artillery and become the consequence yous desire.
You turn on the Eyewear simply by placing information technology on your face up. It's a flake boring to kicking up, taking anywhere between two to five seconds, merely soon plenty the glasses politely introduce themselves with a "expert afternoon" or similar timely greeting.
With the glasses on, yous have a surprising number of command methods. You lot tin can tap the glasses, swipe forth them or pinch and hold them.
Play/interruption, skip tracks, alter volume or summon your telephone's digital banana. You can also enable a four-finger pinch gesture that lets yous perform a voice translation or voice note.
When you lot're finished with the spectacles, simply take them off to let them shut downward. Yet they don't really turn off immediately, since yous can put the spectacles back on once more and continue listening to music straight away if you alter your listen within the three-minute window before the Eyewear turns off fully. The glasses know they're not on your face though, then your phone will either break any you lot're playing or reroute the sound through another device when they're removed, unless you alter that option in the settings.
It's a little deadening to react though, at least when I tested them with a Mate 30 Pro. No phone's capable of a perfectly smooth mitt-off betwixt an audio device and its own speakers, but the couple of seconds' filibuster is more than sluggish than the comparable feel with an iPhone and a pair of AirPods.
Huawei X Gentle Monster Eyewear Two: Privacy
Although you lot tin hear basically everything going on exterior the Eyewear, your own sounds are kept hush-hush. I asked my flatmates to tell me how much they could hear of a podcast and with the volume at my normal level, obviously they couldn't hear a matter. I had to max out the volume before they could tell the spectacles were actually playing music, only that was far as well loud for me to comfortably use.
Huawei X Gentle Monster Eyewear II: Companion apps
Y'all can use the Eyewear via a telephone's Bluetooth carte as an ordinary audio device, just the only way to get full functionality is to download Huawei's AI Life app, available on the Google Play Store or Huawei's App Gallery. You won't find this on the iOS App Store, so Huawei offers instead a specific Eyewear app for you to manage the glasses through, although it offers fewer features.
Whichever app you're using, information technology'southward through this that yous can alter diverse options and send firmware updates to the Eyewear. The big-ticket features enabled by the app are control rebinding and the "Find my glasses" mode on AI Life.
You take a little liberty in customizing what the controls practice. Each command out of double tap, swipe and pinch on either the left or right arm has the choice of two commands or to do nothing. You can also disable wear detection if you detect that bad-mannered to apply.
Find my glasses, unsurprisingly, helps you to track downward your lost pair of Eyewear. Yous need to log in with your Huawei ID, but one time you've washed this, the app shows you a map with the glasses' location, and the glasses themselves produce a beeping audio when you become shut to aid y'all locate it in a pocket-size area.
Huawei X Gentle Monster Eyewear 2: Bombardment
A full charge of the Eyewear will give you five hours of playback co-ordinate to the official figures. I still was able to listen to almost 7 hours of YouTube videos earlier the glasses keeled over, so clearly information technology's possible to squeeze more employ out of a single charge depending on your usage.
That longevity is on par with the average pair of true wireless earbuds. Except without the benefit of a charging case, it's a little trickier to make full them up if you're on the move.
Filling them up from empty to 100% charged takes near an hour and a half. That'southward peradventure slower than would exist ideal, but information technology means you can easily get a day's use from the glasses with a short charging suspension.
Since it uses USB-C to charge, you lot should easily find a cablevision to apply if you lot don't happen to have one on yous, plus your glasses sit down safely in the case while information technology does. That'due south unlike the Bose Frames, which apply a proprietary connector that attaches direct to the glasses themselves, which is far less convenient and increases the risk of accidental impairment to the spectacles.
The overall experience of keeping the Eyewear topped upwards isn't ideal. But information technology's a lot better than what other comparable products are using.
Huawei X Gentle Monster Eyewear II: Lesser Line
The Huawei Eyewear II are well designed both in terms of hardware and software, just as yous'd expect from the company. However as clever as these are, they can't do a huge amount more than than a nice fix of wireless earbuds, and several things they do worse than a pair of 'buds one-half the price or less. Even though these seem amend than the Bose Frames, the increased price doesn't seem quite worth information technology.
These aren't an essential gadget, more an expensive howdy-tech novelty; impressive rather than applied. However I have to tip my hat to Huawei for adding in a number of refinements that I tin foresee becoming the standard for smart glasses in future. It'southward hard to recommend them though, to even people keen on the idea of smart glasses, because of the heart-watering price tag and the difficulty of finding them in the U.S.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/huawei-eyewear-ii
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