What is the truth behind Huawei's push for Eyewear smart glasses?

Huawei and South Korean sunglass company GENTLE MONSTER have jointly launched the smart glasses Eyewear, which will be officially sold in China in mid-September 2019 at a price of RMB 2,499, or about US$349. The main feature of Eyewear is its various intelligent interactive designs, which can be used to operate music playback, answer calls, and other functions through touch and voice assistant.

Eyewear products are priced too high

Although Eyewear is called smart glasses, a big difference compared to many AR products also called smart glasses is that Eyewear does not have an AR optical machine. Therefore, Eyewear has a lower cost and the product pricing is relatively low.

Basically, AR glasses and smart glasses cannot be completely equated. AR glasses have AR optical machines that can project images on glasses. Since the cost of the optical machines is higher, the product pricing will be higher. Smart glasses have operating components and operating function designs.

At the beginning, products such as Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens all have AR and smart functions, so they all use smart glasses as their promotional features. However, with product design considerations, AR glasses products with only optical machines and smart glasses products such as Eyewear without optical machines gradually appeared, which also makes AR glasses and smart glasses not necessarily equal.

Even though they are all called smart glasses, devices like Eyewear are not the same as products like Google Glass. Instead, they are more like the integration of wireless Bluetooth headsets and glasses. In addition to the glasses themselves, the components also include computing chips, microphones, speakers, batteries, transmission elements, etc., so their functions are also closer to Bluetooth headsets, with voice assistants, answering calls, streaming music, etc. as the main features.

If products like Eyewear are viewed as glasses-shaped Bluetooth headsets, the $349 pricing strategy seems too high when compared to the fact that the price of true wireless Bluetooth headsets is unlikely to exceed $200. Therefore, it is difficult for Eyewear to attract general consumers to buy.

Eyewear is a transitional product, paving the way for Huawei to develop AR smart glasses

For Huawei, this cooperation is an attempt and also a layout for future product strategies.

On the one hand, Huawei is interested in AR smart glasses. Eyewear allows Huawei to try out the smart functions first. In the future, as long as AR optical machines and other AR applications are added, AR glasses devices such as HoloLens will be launched.

On the other hand, Huawei is also actively developing true wireless Bluetooth headset products. In addition to the rapid market development of the product, it can also promote the development of Huawei's voice assistant function. In this case, Eyewear is a similar product, which can reduce Huawei's investment in development resources and try to develop another customer base to use Huawei's voice assistant.

Therefore, even if Eyewear is priced high and may not necessarily bring much revenue contribution to Huawei in terms of sales, the additional cost Huawei needs to invest will not be too high. As it is a transitional product towards the development of AR smart glasses, Huawei will naturally be willing to adopt a cooperative model with third-party manufacturers to launch this product and pave the way for the future launch of AR smart glasses.