Meta has led the smart glasses charge with partner Ray-Ban – the first-gen Ray-Ban Meta glasses were hugely successful, and with the announcement of the Ray-Ban Meta 2 glasses, the companies are keen to keep that hype train rolling.
The question is, what’s actually new with the Ray-Ban Meta 2 specs? While we’re yet to go hands-on with the new glasses, we’re frequent users of the first-gen Ray-Ban Meta Glasses – and here’s how the two compare on paper.
Pricing and availability
The original Ray-Ban Meta glasses started at £299/$299 at launch back in late 2023, with lens custom lens finishes and prescription available at additional cost.
The Ray-Ban Meta 2 glasses, however, have seen a price jump to £379/$379, again with custom finishes and prescriptions available at an extra cost.
The good news is that the original glasses are still on sale at the original RRP for those who don’t want to pay the extra for the newer specs.
One of the key upgrades from the second-gen Ray-Ban Meta specs comes in the camera department. While the original Ray-Ban Meta’s 12MP camera maxed out at 1080p, the second-gen specs boost that up to 3K. That’s more than double the pixels, and that should translate to much more detailed photos and videos captured on the smart glasses.
What’s more, the glasses support ultrawide HDR video capture at 60fps – the originals also offered 60fps recording, but without the high dynamic range.
Videos captured on the new specs should look brighter while still retaining key details in darker areas of the shot when compared to the first-gen specs – but we’ll have to put that to the test in our full review.
Not content with just offering a better camera system, the Ray-Ban Meta 2 glasses also offer a much-needed boost in battery life.
While the first-gen specs remain a great option, battery life is one area that you’ll likely be left wanting more – we sure did during our (almost) two years of using the first-gen specs. They’re rated for four hours of mixed use, but if you’re using the cameras or speakers more frequently, that drops down to just a couple of hours before going back in the case.
Now, with the second-gen specs, Meta claims that you’ll get up to eight hours of mixed use from the glasses. As with the first-gen specs, it’s likely that this will depend on what exactly you’re doing with the specs, but at least it should last much longer before needing to slot the glasses back into the case for a top-up.
It’s not just the Ray-Ban Meta 2 glasses themselves that have had an upgrade; the accompanying charging case has also seen similar improvements.
While it still shares the same classic Ray-Ban style as the first-generation specs, the new case offers fast charging tech that delivers a 50% charge – around four hours of use – in just 20 minutes.
That’s a big improvement over the previous-gen specs that offered no fast charging of any sort, meaning you’d have to leave the glasses in the case for well over an hour before getting any sort of decent use out of them.
The case also offers a higher capacity battery that Meta claims brings an additional 48 hours of use to the glasses, up from the original cases’ 32 hours.
Both will soon offer new shooting modes
When Meta revealed the second-gen smart specs, it also announced that new shooting modes would be available in the coming months, delivered by an OTA update.
The update, due in the coming months, should bring both 120fps slow-mo and hyperlapse technology to the glasses. The former is an interesting addition to the roster, potentially adding slow-mo to epic jump shots on your bike or when you jump scare a friend, while the latter could be great for explorers – it just depends on the implementation and how easy they are to activate.
What’s most important here is that the new features are coming to both the first- and second-gen Ray-Ban Meta glasses, with Meta confirming that the software will roll out “across all of our AI glasses” – so there’s no need to upgrade from the first-gen specs to get the feature.
Much of the Ray-Ban Meta experience, whether you opt for the first- or second-gen specs, is Meta AI. Meta’s LLM-based chatbot can make use of cameras to see the world around you and answer specific questions about what you’re looking at, as well as handle more general questions and tasks.
It can be used to call people on WhatsApp, post a video you captured on Instagram and more, and it even offers real-time translation in six languages.
Crucially, the AI and translation experience is identical across both generations of specs, with both also set to get the new Conversation Focus feature – which uses the open-ear glasses to amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to in loud environments – in the coming months.
Early thoughts
The Ray-Ban Meta 2 glasses seem like a fairly solid, if iterative, update to the hugely popular smart glasses line-up with better camera quality and boosted battery life – but in most areas, including AI performance and even upcoming AI features, the Meta 2 glasses are almost identical to their predecessor.
Some will, of course, value the extra battery life and improved camera quality, but for most existing owners, it might be harder to justify the upgrade.
That said, we’ll update this comparison with hands-on impressions once we’ve spent some time with the Ray-Ban Meta 2 glasses, so check back soon.
