A Meta Ray-Ban Wayfarer Smartglasses Review
Happy July 4th! Perfect time to review a random product I bought for Christmas!
I bought the Meta Ray-Ban Wayfarer smartglasses and put transition prescription lenses into them way back in January 2025 as a late Christmas gift to myself thanks in part to my wife's vision insurance. I chose these Meta smartglasses because there just wasn't another accessible option at the time. At this time, most competing smartglasses were Kickstarter campaigns where the people behind the product weren't giving me the best confidence in their ability to deliver or the glasses were just too bulky to be everyday glasses. I knew the company, Meta, had a bad reputation, but I was already in their ecosystem with the Meta Quest 2 and Quest 3 as well as my semi-active Facebook accounts. I figured why not go ahead and treat myself to this as a gateway drug into smartglasses to get myself into them and know what they're like.
This is a 6-month review that is admittedly very critical of the product.
The good parts...
Nice frames!
The frame comes in two sizes, regular and large, and the large frames fit most really large head sizes. Some people may not like these frames at all, but they are pretty small considering what's in them.
Handsfree recording
The ability to record a video hands free using voice commands is amazing, and it usually works great. When I need to get past bad voice recognition, there's a useful button on the right side I can tap for photos or long-press for videos. It really works well, and the convenience of it is pretty awesome.
Top notch audio
Sound quality is amazing! Everything sounds like it's in the room with me! Meta smartglasses offer a very realistic sound experience and can easily trick your senses and make you think something happened near you, like a knock on the door or a barking dog. If I wear headphones over these glasses, the sound from the glasses gets more bass and gets much louder. Great for when you want to hear your phone calls while listening to game audio or a movie but don't want to disturb others.
The microphone sounds great on calls. I haven't used it for much else other than voice recognition, though.
Voice recognition is pretty good!
Voice recognition is pretty good by the way. It understands things quite well most of the time based on the voice logs. Meta AI does a good job of understanding what I'm saying. Your mileage may vary.
The meh parts...
Not perfectly comfortable
These smartglasses are decently comfortable, but they aren't as comfortable as regular glasses with Bluetooth earbuds and a phone. They're heavy on your nose. They don't adjust to as many face shapes as smaller eyeglass frames. There aren't nose pieces yet for these glasses, either. I also don't think you can easily put your own DIY nose pads on these glasses without seriously nerfing them.
Not waterproof! 
Barely IPX4.
They also are sensitive to water, unlike regular glasses, making them a liability on rainy days or when in a pool or when taking a shower or even when sweating. Even a little steam from a shower can cause the audio of these glasses to break temporarily until they dry out. There's no easy way to waterproof these glasses, either.
They advertise as water resistant, but they barely qualify as IPX4 considering you can't even wear them in the rain for long without applying some rain resistance spray or wearing a hood over them.
My best solution has been to cover the sides in electrical tape, because that was where most of the water entered the device, where the speaker holes were. Unfortunately, that kills the ability to hear anything and also disables some power saving features. It also looks awful and feels awful and is hard to do regularly. Also note that you can't cover up the microphone without ruining speech recognition and phone call quality. It also makes the volume auto-adjustment feature break.
I can understand and appreciate why these aren't waterproof, but it is definitely a problem I want fixed in the future, even if it's just more resistance to rain and sweat. Just make them work while I sweat! I sweat for 2 minutes and they temporarily break, making them useless for workouts in hot weather without some kind of headband. I want to use these glasses outside more, especially on the beach and during runs! I don't always have a headband ready.
Low quality camera
The camera is low quality by 2025 standards and stuck to vertical portrait format... unless I take the glasses off and physically turn them sideways, in which case, they stop working most of the time to save power, which you can work around using covers on the ear hooks or by just turning the power saving features off.
The bad, oof...
Short battery life
You'll want to leave power saving features enabled, because the battery life is abysmal. These last maybe 3 hours as Bluetooth headphones before they need a charge. 4 hours if you turn off the AI features entirely. If you don't use the audio constantly, they can last up to 5 hours, and with power saving features enabled, they can last a while, but in my experience, they last 3-4 hours with moderate use and an occasional photo taken. Turning them off is very quick and easy, but turning them back on requires about 20 seconds of boot time, so if you need them for quick photos on-the-go, you'll leave them powered on and wear them until they die. You also can't charge them while using them. Thankfully, the case charges them very quickly, and they're still decent eyeglasses when turned off, so this isn't really a major issue most of the time... it just sucks a ton when you're trying to use the glasses for a long period of time and can't carry the case with you. The case, by the way, is kind of big and not even close to waterproof.
There are some charging cable alternatives on AliExpress which claim they solve the battery life issue, but I don't know if they actually work for the intended use case. When the glasses are charging, they tend to go into auto-transfer mode, and they may not be able to be used and charged at the same time. I'll grab one of these AliExpress cables someday soon and update the article when I know more.
Almost no customization
You can't customize the AI activation
phrase. It's trained to only respond to "Hey Meta" and won't work as an
always on assistant or as a voice log system. I would like to see some
customization allowing different activation phrases, like only saying
"meta" or having a custom name for the AI, like "Jarvis"! 
Meta AI ignores you sometimes
Meta's AI sometimes ignores things I tell it to do even if it understands perfectly. For example, I ask it to "play chiptune music" and it saves to the voice logs accurately, but it ends up playing random electro tunes or just doesn't do anything at all. The solution is to repeat what you said with more dictation on the "hey meta" part.
App integrations are limited and not reliable
Integration with Amazon is shaky and keeps breakin. Often when I say "play music on Amazon", it just responds "I cannot do that on Amazon." Its Spotify integration has so far been reliable aside from some kind of glitch when I first installed the "Meta AI" app update which replaced the old Meta app and temporarily bricked the glasses. There are no other music app integrations, so no YT Music integration, and you cannot use these glasses' microphone to run Bixby, Samsung's AI, trust me, I tried. Meta AI also cannot open apps which don't have integrations. Meanwhile, my phone's built-in AI can open pretty much anything from a notes app to Amazon Music to YouTube to websites in specific browsers. Why can't I get the same or more functionality out of Meta?
Streaming options limited
You can only stream to Instagram or Facebook, not even Tiktok is allowed. Pretty lame to limit what platforms we can stream to, Meta. Anyway, the Facebook streaming worked fine, but it wasn't easy to do, and the Instagram app integration never worked for me, so I don't know what that's like.
Video length limits
The video recordings were limited to 3 minutes, up 2 minutes from the previously existing limit of 1 minute (before I bought them). I would like to see the limit increased to 20 minutes at least so I could use these for longer product unboxing videos. However, it's easy enough to cut together multiple recordings after importing the videos to my computer.
Videos and photos stuck in portrait format
The primary annoyance is not the time limit but the portrait format. I can't just zoom in the footage because it's too low quality for that. I can say the same for static image quality which is why I'm only using these for Instagram style social media posts, not for YouTube quality content. I also see myself often still taking my phone out to take pictures simply because the phone's image quality is way higher, especially in low lighting scenarios. The phone can also do hyperlapse videos without editing anything and have no time limit other than storage limits, so I just don't see myself utilizing these glasses for video recording unless I just need the convenience of both hands still being free, which is often the case to be fair.
Camera is only on left side
One more annoyance to mention: the camera is on the left side of the glasses. It looks like these glasses were designed to have a camera on each side, but they just decided to cheap out and put a light on the right side and no camera. Having a camera on each side would have helped to stitch the view of each eye and get a centered view.
Lights are annoying
I know, I know: the lights let people know you're filming them. I don't want to stealth-film people, but people already do this quite easily with other cameras, so I don't see why we're demanding smartglasses announce "Hey, I'm filming you!" It's not only annoying to the wearer but also makes some use cases for these glasses not work as well. For example, you may want to film a scene in the movie theater without getting on everyone else's nerves. I could do this with my phone but not my glasses for some reason.
Final Thoughts
Overall, for the price, these smartglasses are only valid as really high quality Bluetooth open ear headphones which don't block the outside world. I personally love that feature on its own. I'm constantly listening to audiobooks while I'm talking to people and watching YouTube quietly during dinner or while waiting on a movie to start. It's extremely convenient to use these glasses as open ear headphones for my phone. However, it's not easy to switch them over to other devices when you want to listen to something other than your phone. Not a dealbreaker for me but it might get pretty annoying if you want to use them on your laptop as well as your phone. I wish they'd make these dual-connectable so I could connect to two devices at the same time as well as allow multiple glasses to connect to the same phone. That last part might be a tough ask since it's up to the phone manufacturers.
The AI features suck. The phone integrations are too limited and not reliable. I often prefer to use Samsung's Bixby to control my phone handsfree instead of Meta AI.
The liabilities are just too abundant to use them everywhere. That said, if they were somehow waterproof, a lot of their liabilities would go away. For example, if they were waterproof, they'd be great shower music and great for music in the rain. They kind of work as-is for jogging in light rain, but they will cut off after a short while being wet and the microphone breaks almost immediately when wet. You can get a similar earbuds solution for much less money if music is all you want, and the earbuds can be waterproof and cost half as much and have much longer battery life.
I'm keeping my smartglasses until they break because I have too much invested in them, but I'm really into the idea of an upgrade sooner rather than later. I would not recommend these Meta smartglasses to anyone, but I will consider trying Android XR glasses in a year or two.
Part of me wishes I could work a "It's over 9000!" meme into this, because these are getting pretty close to Saiyan scouters.