RayNeo X3 Pro Review: These AR Smart Glasses May Haunt My Dreams

If you really, really want to try AR smart glasses like right now, I have some advice. Are you ready? Here it is… you should wait.

AR smart glasses might technically be a thing in the here and now, but if there’s one thing that using the $1,100 RayNeo X3 Pro taught me, it’s that the here and now may be enticing, but it can also be one, big, huge, Android-filled headache.

---

---

The display is impressive

I’m willing to bet that the first thing you’ll say when you power on the RayNeo X3 Pro is “whoa.†That’s what I said, and also what a few other people I let try the smart glasses said when the display kicked on. The screen on these smart glasses really is something. It’s bright, it has dimension, and it’s sharp. Specifically, the RayNeo X3 Pro has a 640 x 480 dual-lens color micro LED display with 6,000 nits of peak brightness. That brightness tops even the Meta Ray-Ban Display, which maxes out at 5,000 nits, and I can say, having tried both, that the RayNeo X3 Pro appears much sharper. Colors also appear a lot more vibrant.

The fact that the RayNeo X3 Pro have a more premium-looking screen than the Meta Ray-Ban Display is no surprise in some ways, because the Meta’s display smart glasses aren’t exactly what RayNeo is targeting. If anything, the RayNeo X3 Pro has its sights set on future smart glasses like Meta’s Orion concept—full-on AR smart glasses that offer more than just a single, tiny screen for notifications. With these smart glasses, you’re supposed to watch movies in them, or play games, or use any number of apps—that’s on top of being able to tackle all the typical stuff like navigation, translation, music playback, calling, notifications, and more.

In case you haven’t gathered, the RayNeo X3 Pro’s ambitions are lofty, which is fun. It’s also potentially the smart glasses’ downfall.

Native apps, UI, oh my…

Before I get to the frustrating stuff, let’s start with the basics.

Inside the glasses, you’ll see a few menus. There’s a notifications hub where you can see emails and messages. Then, there’s a second truncated menu that shows information at a glance, like charge status, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and the time (you can also trigger the Google Gemini voice assistant here). Lastly, there’s a bigger menu with apps lined horizontally. You navigate all of this using swipes (up, down, left, and right) on the touchpad located on the right arm. It’s almost like a laptop touchpad in some ways. It registers taps (one tap for select and two taps for going back), while the left arm is touch-sensitive and can control volume.

One thing you should know about touch controls is that they’re sensitive. Almost too sensitive. I find myself overshooting where I want to go frequently or tapping things I didn’t want to tap. The right arm is so sensitive, in fact, that it actually registers a tap before my finger touches the arm, or at least before it makes enough contact for me to feel the plastic on my fingertip. It’s kind of impressive but also kind of frustrating. Like any controls, you will get more used to them the more you use them, though I wouldn’t call their performance ideal.

If you don’t want to use them, you can also pull open the app and use a touchpad there to navigate the UI. It’s not exactly a convenient way to control the smart glasses, but it’s a lot less prone to misinterpretations.

App-wise, the RayNeo X3 Pro come pre-loaded with most of the stuff you’d expect from a pair of smart glasses in 2025. There are notifications that pop in intermittently in the UI. This will give you updates from apps like Gmail and Instagram. It’s also compatible with phones, though I wasn’t able to get text or call notifications from my iPhone 17 to show up. The RayNeo X3 Pro run a fork of Android, so maybe you’ll have more luck with your non-iOS phone.

The RayNeo X3 Pro come preloaded with translation. I used them to translate Spanish to English, asking my partner to say some phrases, and it worked just okay. Weirdly, the smart glasses seem to wait until the speaker is done with their thought to translate, which is not ideal for having a natural conversation, but it at least got most of the words correct. Like other translation apps, the translated speech can be a bit literal, so sometimes the phrases won’t come out the way you’d say them in your native language.

There’s navigation, which in this case is a pretty sleek interface, though I wasn’t able to test its accuracy much for reasons I’ll get to later. From the navigation app, you’re able to dictate a destination, or if you don’t feel like using your voice, you can enter an address using the RayNeo app. The RayNeo app doesn’t let you screenshot while you’re using maps for some reason, so I can’t show you what it looks like, but the interface is fairly clean.

After dictating a location, you’ll be presented with options, and you can use your voice or tap the right arm to select which one you want. From there, you’ll be presented with several route options and a top-down map of what they look like. Here you can also choose whether you’re walking or biking.

Once you select your route, the UI will shrink and give you a small map in the right corner with a compass around it as well as verbal directions on the left side telling you the distance until your next move and what you should be doing (i.e., 224 meters and “Go straightâ€). At the bottom, there’s an estimated arrival time and distance. It’s a fairly simple feature, but it looks serviceable and understands my dictated destinations. It is, however, more conspicuous than other navigation apps I’ve used, which feels like it could be a problem, especially if you’re biking. The menus are bright and fairly centered in your line of sight. If you’re easily distracted, this may not be the app for you.

One cool thing that the RayNeo X3 Pro have that other smart glasses I’ve tested do not is AliPay, which is a mobile payment app. To use AliPay, you can open the app, scan a QR code, and then confirm the payment with your voice. That means, if your bank account is linked via the connected AliPay app as well as the RayNeo app, you can buy things with your smart glasses. I didn’t much care for hooking my bank account to something for the purposes of this review, so I can’t speak to how well this feature works, but the fact that it exists is kind of neat.

Outside of those features, there are a few simple apps for things like photos, where all your videos and photos taken with the smart glasses are stored. You can navigate and look at your pictures here by selecting them with a tap, and delete them by swiping down. There’s not much to remark on here; it’s a photos app. Photos are apparently 4K resolution, but they’re quite soft-looking given the fact that there’s just a single 12-megapixel camera located under the nose bridge. Videos are equally as soft-looking (maybe a bit more, actually) and top out at 1440p for now, which is nowhere near the 3K quality of competitors like the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 AI glasses. Videos are also clearly stabilized heavily with software, which is something that Meta does in its AI glasses as well, though I find RayNeo’s stabilization to be a bit more jarring. If image/video capture is a priority for you, Meta’s offerings feel like the much better option for now.

There’s a “to-do†app where you can set reminders, which worked sometimes but also refused to work other times by not listening to my dictation. It’s also worth noting that the onboard voice assistant (Gemini) seemed to be completely unaware of the reminders that I set. Every time I queried about one, with a “Hey RayNeo, do I have any items on my to-do list?†I was met with a “RayNeo can’t do that.†The integration between AI assistant and smart glasses could be a lot tighter in my opinion.

There’s also a recording app that uses the smart glasses’ microphone to record you and your surroundings. I’d like to tell you more about how that works, but I was having issues with accessing my recordings, so I decided to restart the glasses. After that, they refused to connect to my phone, preventing me from even accessing the UI of the smart glasses and writing this review properly.

In some ways, though, that was a relief, given what I’m about to tell you next.

Downloading third-party apps is a nightmare

If you’re like me and are tantalized by the idea of using third-party apps inside your AR smart glasses (yay, TikTok on your face!), you might see the RayNeo X3 Pro and think, “damn, I have to get me a pair of those.†But before you do that, I would suggest asking yourself one thing: how frustrated are you willing to be? I ask that because I unknowingly thought the smart glasses would come preloaded with the Google Play store, like similar AR smart glasses I’ve tried, but they, much to my dismay… do not.

I’m told by RayNeo that currently, “the user version of the glasses does not support the direct installation of third-party apps.â€Â  That means you’ll have to go to the RayNeo app and “install third-party applications through the third-party app installation list on the app’s homepage.†There’s just one issue: I didn’t see any third-party apps available on that list. That leaves me with one option: sideloading, which is just a tech jargon-y way of saying, “do it without a real app store.†If that process sounds janky, I’m unhappy to tell you that it very much is.

To sideload apps, you’ll need to download and install what’s called the Android Debug Bridge, a tool that lets you run command lines to Android devices. You’ll then need to use command-line prompts to connect your smart glasses and laptop, and then use an app like Sidequest to install APKs manually as a developer would.

That might sound relatively simple on paper, but if you’re not familiar with sideloading like me, it can be a nightmare. It took me several hours of troubleshooting to actually get my Windows machine to recognize the RayNeo X3 Pro, a process that was waylaid by Windows 11 driver incompatibility and weird admin restrictions on one of my laptops that I was, prior to this process, unaware of. Even after I was finally able to get Sidequest to recognize the RayNeo X3 Pro, I was still unable to get the APKs I wanted to install on the smart glasses. I did successfully get F-Droid onto the device (an Android app repository), though I ran into a permissions issue that prevented me from downloading anything from F-Droid within the glasses UI.

I probably could figure both issues out with more troubleshooting, but I have more things to do than just review one pair of smart glasses, unfortunately. And let’s not forget that this is the process that RayNeo actually recommends users undergo for getting other apps onto the RayNeo X3 Pro, which feels both hilarious and borderline sadistic.

There are probably developers and other more code-savvy people out there laughing at this passage, but the fact of the matter is most people who are interested in smart glasses want a pair that works out of the box. They might not expect to have to enter command lines on a laptop in order to download apps, and I can’t blame them. If you’re the type of person who doesn’t mind tinkering around with your device, the RayNeo X3 Pro might be something to keep on your radar, but if you’re not, then you should run away as fast as you can.

RayNeo’s official explanation for why there aren’t many apps available for the RayNeo X3 Pro is because of “security restrictions and compatibility considerations.†Not sure if that will give you any solace after you’ve spent over $1,000 on a pair of AR smart glasses with no apps, but don’t shoot the messenger.

Battery life, build quality, and more caveats

As much jankiness as I’ve already covered here, there’s actually a bit more. One strange caveat you should note is that, if you’re on an iOS device, the smart glasses don’t function the same as competitors like the Meta Ray-Ban Display when it comes to internet connectivity.

I’m told by a representative for RayNeo that Android users can share their network via Bluetooth as they would on a pair of Meta’s glasses, but if you’re using an iOS device, you have to use what’s called Personal Area Network (PAN), which is the technical term for your iPhone’s built-in hotspot. For some, that might be fine, but for me personally… it’s very much not. The thing about hotspots is that, depending on your carrier, you may or may not have one. While a lot of phone plans do nowadays, mine does not. That means that the RayNeo X3 Pro are functionally useless when I’m out and about.

What I’m trying to say is, beware; if you’re an iPhone user, there are some major caveats here that you should really consider before pulling the trigger on the RayNeo X3 Pro.

Another major concern you may have for a device like this is battery life, and on that front, I don’t really have great news to deliver. While RayNeo says the X3 Pro have a 5-hour battery life, that is obviously very dependent on what you’re doing. In my experience, if you’re using the AR smart glasses passively (in very short bursts) for some audio playback and a little bit of screen time, you might make it 5 hours, though I observed a little less, maybe 3.5 to 4 hours. If you’re doing something that’s more demanding, like watching a YouTube video, however, these smart glasses are woefully short on juice.

As I’ve already established, I wasn’t able to properly sideload apps to test video playback out at length (all I got to watch were some sample videos that were preinstalled on the glasses), but YouTuber Informal Tech, who has tested the RayNeo X3 Pro at length, got about 36 minutes in a video playback test with the smart glasses set to auto brightness. That’s, uh… not great.

That not-so-great battery life is a drag, but there is actually a silver lining in a way (and no, it’s not that you can stop using the smart glasses). The tradeoff here is that the battery is bad mostly because the RayNeo X3 Pro are light. These smart glasses weigh just 76g, which is slightly more than the Meta Ray-Ban Display, which weigh in at about 69g. While that is a few grams more than Meta, they still feel fairly low footprint on my face, which is a testament to the overall ergonomics and design. It’s also a great deal lighter than similar AR smart glasses like the Inmo Air 3, which weigh a whopping 119g and feel like a boulder.

Sure, the plastic is a little cheap and prone to fingerprints, but on the surface (if you didn’t know about the lack of functional apps and bugs), the RayNeo X3 Pro may look and feel like the AR smart glasses you’ve been waiting for. That is, if you’re the type of person who’s interested in that sort of thing. Are they obviously smart glasses? Yes, these are nowhere near as inconspicuous as the Meta Ray-Ban Display or Meta’s AI glasses, but they’re also a hell of a lot less obvious than competitors like Inmo or Snap’s Spectacle glasses.

One point I’ll also give RayNeo is that the audio also sounds pretty damn good on the RayNeo X3 Pro, maybe even better than the Meta Ray-Ban Display. I listened to music through Spotify on my phone, and it feels like it has added dimension compared to others I’ve tried, maybe even a little bass, which is surprising. These aren’t going to unseat my favorite open-ear wireless earbuds (the Soundpeats Clip1) anytime soon, but I was surprised nonetheless. If there weren’t so many issues with apps and if the AR smart glasses had a better battery life, these might be my new favorite smart glasses, sound-wise.

Should you buy these AR smart glasses?

Listen, I’m not here to tell you what you should and shouldn’t do, but you should definitely not buy these smart glasses. There, I said it. It’s not that there aren’t some promising parts of the RayNeo X3 Pro; the display is impressive, the form factor is light, and the UI is simple, clean, and mostly functional. Despite those upsides, though, the AR smart glasses still fail some critical benchmarks, especially in the app department.

If the Meta Ray-Ban Display have too few apps, the RayNeo X3 Pro are basically a desert. That could change at some point if developers get on board and start designing more stuff, but the only choice that I have right now is to review the RayNeo X3 Pro as they are, and “as they are†is incomplete. In fact, the entire AR smart glasses market (or really smart glasses in general) feels incomplete. If you’re an early adopter with lots of expendable income who doesn’t care about dropping $1,100 ($1,299 for non-early bird pricing) on a pair of smart glasses that feel like a project, then by all means, consider the RayNeo X3 Pro.

But if you’re like most of us and looking for a refined gadget that can do all of the things you’d hope then I would take that $1,000 and buy a couple of sticks of RAM. Chances are the latter will be a lot more useful in the immediate future.