Gentle Monster, Warby Parker Open Smart Glasses Preorders

Google's smart glasses are on sale before they're in stores. Preorders opened on Thursday, November 12, for the intelligent eyewear collections the company built with Samsung and two frame designers, Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. The pitch runs against the category's history: no screens, no headset bulk, and frames that are meant to be chosen the way sunglasses are chosen. General sales start December 10 in the United States and South Korea.

The division of labor is the design. Samsung engineered the hardware. Google supplies the Android XR platform and Gemini, its voice assistant, which wearers summon hands-free. The eyewear brands own the frames, the prescription fitting and the customer relationship. Under the frames, the glasses run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chip and weigh about 41 grams in Gentle Monster's lightest configuration, roughly the weight of ordinary sunglasses.

The hardware list is short because the glasses don't show anything. A 12-megapixel camera on the temple feeds Gemini what the wearer sees. Four microphones and two speakers handle the conversation. There's 64 gigabytes of storage, and Samsung rates the battery at up to nine hours. Wearers can translate a conversation as it happens, ask for directions, hear summaries of incoming messages and record point-of-view footage. An indicator light shows when the camera is capturing.

Gentle Monster's collection is the fashion statement of the two. It covers six designs, two optical frames and four sunglasses, in 16 combinations of color and lens. The colors run bold: dark red, pink, gray and yellow, with tinted, clear, blue or brown lenses, and prescription options for most frames. Prices run $449 to $489. The brand is previewing the full line in public in New York, at 23 Wall Street, from November 13 to 23, and its first United States preorder batch runs November 12 to 15.

Warby Parker takes the volume position. Its frames start at $395, and the glasses work across phone brands: Google Pixel 7 and newer, Samsung Galaxy S and Z phones, and recent iPhones. That compatibility is the strategic core of the launch. The eyewear isn't tied to one phone maker's customers, and it's sold through the eyewear brands' own stores and websites, next to ordinary frames, rather than through electronics channels alone.

The test starts December 10. Display-equipped smart glasses are still in testing, Google says, so this launch asks buyers to pay $395 to $489 for a camera and an assistant in a frame they'd wear anyway. Gentle Monster opened its push with a short film starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Jonathan Glazer, which tells you where the brands think the sale is won: on the face, not on the spec sheet.

The launch has hard edges buyers should see before they order. At release, the glasses work only with Google accounts from the United States and South Korea, and only for users 18 and older. Some features need setup or a subscription, and pricing is before prescription lenses and upgrades. Demo pairs are going into more than 360 Warby Parker stores and select Google Stores, which matters more than it sounds: fit is the product here, and a 41-gram frame still has to sit right on a particular face.