Tech
Smart glasses without a camera? Even Realities bets productivity beats recording everyone
In the past few years, multiple tech executives have told us that glasses could be the next big interface for consumer hardware. And yet, today’s smart glasses rely a lot on phones, even if they have good hardware. Even Realities’ G2 smart glasses are in the same boat. They’re a premium-looking pair of glasses with a neon-style heads-up display you can see in any lighting — but their functionality relies heavily on their connectivity with the phone, which can be** unreliable and frustrating.
Even Realities takes a different approach to smart glasses than players like Meta. Their devices have a monochrome heads-up display that shows text and information in green, giving it the look of a neon board.
There are no cameras or speakers, and that is by design. The company wants to focus on productivity rather than recording, so the people around you don’t have to worry about being filmed.
The G2 is the second pair of smart glasses from Even Realities and an improvement over the G1 released a few years ago. The G2 has a brighter 1,200-nit display (vs. 1,000 nits on the G1), four mics (vs. two), and a 75% larger display area than its predecessor. The new display also has a better 60Hz refresh rate, compared with 20Hz on the G1.
In the few months I’ve used the G2, the connectivity with the phone has improved tremendously. Early on, the glasses would disconnect from the app so frequently that I nearly gave up on them. But after a few app updates, that issue got better.
The glasses are targeted at people who might be constantly in meetings, giving presentations, and traveling to countries where different languages are spoken.
Design
The glasses, which come in two frame designs, are very light at 35 grams. The frame is made out of magnesium alloy, and the temples (the arms that go over your ears) are made out of titanium alloy. In terms of weight and fit, the glasses were comfortable to wear.
Since I work from home most of the time, though, I didn’t feel much need to wear them all day. That said, the lenses have UV protection built in, so they’re still worth wearing outside just for eye protection — smart features or not.
The company claims that, based on typical usage, G2’s battery can last up to two days on a single charge. The glasses come with a protective case that can recharge them up to seven times before needing to be plugged in itself. I personally didn’t test the two-day claim, but the battery lasted me long enough to put them back into the case without running out of juice.
That case is big — you can’t shove it in a pocket — but it’s solid, and the glasses fit in snugly.
Features and operation
The glasses act as your companion for schedules, reminders, and access to notes. You can wake them up by tapping on the stem-based controls. If you double-tap on the control pad on the stem, you will see a dashboard with information like your upcoming meetings, stocks, and top news.
The G2 can also show real-time phone notifications, but the pop-ups weren’t always reliable — and since my phone is usually within reach anyway, I didn’t find much use for the feature.
Long-pressing the temple control opens a menu with several functions: a notifications tray, Translate, Conversate, Teleprompt, a to-do list, and Navigate. Translate lets you set a target language and converse with anyone. At the recent Global Connect Show (GCS) in China, I wore the glasses while talking to company reps doing demos, and the translation was good enough for me to follow along when someone spoke Chinese. I also tried it with other journalists speaking various languages, including French and Spanish. (The downside of this feature is that the other person doesn’t know what you’re saying in your language unless they’re also using the app.)
Navigate is a cool feature that shows turn-by-turn directions on the heads-up display. The catch: it doesn’t work with Google or Apple Maps. Instead, you have to set your route through the Even Realities app. I tried it a few times walking to cafes near my house. The directions showed up well on the display, but the app kept getting the addresses wrong, so I can’t rely on it for places I don’t already know how to get to. Still, I could see cyclists or motorbike riders finding it useful once the company fixes the accuracy issues.
Conversate, at first, just showed a live transcript of the conversation on the glasses, which felt pointless since you can just as easily record a meeting with an app or an external notetaker. Later, the company added a “prep notes” feature that surfaces more context: you can manually add notes or documents ahead of a meeting and let the AI reference them during the conversation, or let it listen in real time and pop up short explainer bubbles for concepts as they come up. For instance, during a briefing about energy, it showed me a bubble for “Green Hydrogen,” and tapping it brought up a definition right in front of my eyes. That was genuinely useful — though I wouldn’t want a transcript or explainer bubbles for every conversation I have.
At the center of all this is the built-in assistant, Even AI. As with any voice assistant, you say a wake word to activate it and ask questions or add items to your to-do list. It often misunderstood my to-do list requests, and for general questions, the answers were often long paragraphs that streamed across the screen with no way to interrupt or skip ahead.
Another issue: despite having four mics, Even AI often failed to activate, or misheard me, when I was outside. The ambient noise in India could have played a part, but I’d still expect a modern gadget to have better noise handling.
The G2’s screen was legible in most conditions, but in a bright room I had to adjust the brightness manually through the app. Even if the company hasn’t built an automatic-brightness sensor yet, I’d like to see a manual brightness control built into the glasses themselves, rather than requiring the phone app.
Don’t put the R1 ring on it
Even launched a companion ring called the R1 alongside the G2. The idea is to control the glasses through a touch surface on the ring instead of the glasses’ own touch controls. But its price and functionality don’t quite justify the cost.
The ring works well, and I didn’t have any issues using it. But I struggled to find scenarios where I actually needed it, since the touch-sensitive temples on the glasses already do the same job.
On top of that, Even built health tracking into the ring — heart rate, calories, steps, sleep, and SpO2 (blood oxygen level). Personally, I’d rather go for a dedicated ring like Oura or Ultrahuman if I wanted that form factor with health tracking. Second, if I already use a fitness tracker, I wouldn’t want to buy a ring where health is an auxiliary function for a ring that is meant to control the glass.
All this functionality bumps up the ring’s price to $249, which is not cheap. If I used my smart glasses a lot, I would consider buying a controller ring at a lower price if it also had a mic, which I could use for issuing commands to the AI assistant. As it stands, I’d skip the R1.
Where does Even G2 stand?
Smart glasses are coming out fast. Camera-equipped, screen-free models like the Meta Ray-Bans are popular, but Meta, Snap, and other competitors are racing to build glasses with color screens, too. Only a handful of Chinese companies — like Rokid and Inmo — are making glasses with this same neon-display style.
The Even G2 costs $599 and delivers solid hardware in a light, good-looking frame. The company is also working to make the glasses more customizable by supporting third-party apps, though I didn’t find any app compelling enough to make me reach for the glasses more often. They’re a nice-to-have: fun to explore if you like tinkering with new hardware and don’t mind trying out third-party apps.
The hardware itself is good, but outside of jobs that require constant translation or teleprompting, it’s hard to find a clear everyday use case for smart glasses like these.
Even’s bet is that skipping the camera and speakers is the right move for a productivity-focused device — and I don’t disagree with that direction. But now that the company has newly reached unicorn status, it needs to build out more first-party software to make the glasses something people actually reach for every day.
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Tech
Hugging Face’s CEO on why companies are done renting their AI
Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he’s worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
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Tech
Dumb Co dared me to trade my iPhone for a hacked flip phone
When Lydia Peabody saw her friend pull out a flip phone at a party last year, she burst out laughing.
“I was like, ‘Girl, what are you doing with that thing? That has to be a joke!’” Peabody told TechCrunch. But it wasn’t just a prop — her friend was participating in Month Offline, a community challenge in which a small cohort of people exchange their smartphones for flip phones.
Peabody couldn’t fathom giving up her smartphone, but her friend inspired her. A year later, her life looks different. She left her career as a licensed therapist to become the founding CMO of Dumb Co, the flip phone company that grew out of Month Offline. She’s happier.
“I did Month Offline, and I was like, ‘Whoa, why am I suddenly not anxious? Am I feeling good?’” she said. “I didn’t even know that this is what I needed, and that spending this much time on my screen after work was causing me to feel so yucky.”
Dumb Co sells flip phones that sync to your smartphone, rather than replace it, forging a happy medium between the infinite connectivity of the iPhone and the unrealistic limitations of an early 2000s relic. Funded by friends and family, the company is run by a small team in their 20s and early 30s. Like their peers, they’re dissatisfied with the fast pace of plugged-in, frictionless life. They grew up with iPads and Instagram but now crave something simpler.
In the humble shell of a $20 TCL flip phone, Dumb Co loads its own software so that users can access apps like WhatsApp, Spotify, Apple Music, and Uber. You can even access iMessage through a third-party app (shh, don’t tell Apple). By packaging familiar comforts like music streaming, maps, and blue bubble texts in a flip phone, Dumb Co is creating something for people who want to reduce their screen time and be more present but struggle to fully disconnect in a world built for the smartphone.
“We are trying to make something where you can leave your smartphone at home and literally just live your life and engage with other people,” Afreka Ebanks, Dumb Co’s communications director, told TechCrunch. “And when you want to be on your smartphone and you come back home, you can use it, because the feature for call forwarding and text forwarding can be turned off.”
I spent over a month testing the device — which Dumb Co calls the Dumb Phone — buoyed by the knowledge that in case of emergency, I always had my iPhone on hand. I didn’t use the Dumb Phone that much at first, but as I carried it around to show my friends, I noticed that they weren’t confused by my flip phone — they were envious of it.
“I’ve been getting into a lot of interesting conversations with people as I’m walking and someone sees me at the stoplight like, ‘What is this thing you have?’” said Ebanks, who bedazzled her flip phone. “I think it’s a great conversation starter, and I think it’s incredible watching people — myself included — work through the awkwardness of socializing with others, because I’m no longer distracted because I’m looking down at my phone.”
The Dumb Phone is clunky at times. It’s slower than I’m used to, and I end up spending more time typing T9 texts than if I just used my iPhone (what I really want is a dumb Sidekick with a QWERTY keyboard). Yet there’s something undeniably refreshing about knowing that if you want to open social media, take a picture you’ll never look at again, or check your email, you can’t.
When I talked to Peabody toward the end of my month of dual iPhone/flip phone ownership, she asked if I had ever left the house with just my flip phone. I confessed that I had not. I explained that sometimes I need to check public transit schedules, or keep up with Slack if I go to an appointment during the day.
“The truth is, when you say the word need, it almost gives the same meaning as like, ‘I need food or shelter,’” Peabody told me. “Yeah, sure, it’s actually helpful to know when the buses are coming, but if you don’t have that information, you turn to your neighbor and say, ‘Do you know when the next bus is coming?’”
Peabody dared me to leave my iPhone at home. The day we spoke, I had already planned to report on an event at a library across town. I tried to explain that I had never been to this library and wasn’t sure what subway stop to get off at. She told me to just write down directions before I left. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to record interviews at the event. She told me that the Dumb Phone can record audio.
“I really, really want you to do this, because I know that this is something that’s best experienced,” Peabody said. “When I switched to a Dumb Phone last summer, I did not use my smartphone for seven weeks, and I went on a cross-country road trip to New Mexico. I did not think I could do that, but I’m telling you that you can.”
I was running out of excuses. Peabody drove thousands of miles without a smartphone. How could I tell her that I needed my iPhone so that I could triple-check that Tasker-Morris is the right train stop?
Smartphones and social media are not a one-sided evil. There’s real value in connecting with friends online, sending pictures of your dog to your grandma, and using Apple Pay when you forget your wallet. While researchers don’t classify smartphone dependence like they would a substance addiction, there are certainly parallels. Not everyone has an adversarial relationship with their phone, but for people like me, more screen time often makes me feel more anxious, unfocused, and less grounded. Peabody even compared her relationship with her phone to getting hooked on Juul in college.
“It was really, really hard, but I totally broke that addiction, and now when I see a vape or something, I actually detest it — I’m like, ‘Oh no, I do not want that,’” she said. “When I turned off my smartphone for seven weeks, I would think about using it again, and I felt that same repulsion. I actually didn’t look at it or touch it.”
I was nervous to leave my iPhone at home, but I trusted my knowledge of the transit system and managed to get myself across town without my iPhone (I will admit, I texted someone just to be extra super sure that the library is off the Tasker-Morris stop). When I needed to send a text that was too long for T9 typing, I sent a voice message. I felt more connected with the world around me, and nothing went wrong.
I don’t see myself exclusively switching to the Dumb Phone, but I find it valuable as a tool to help me pay more attention to how and when I’m using my smartphone. The Dumb Phone ships with a black velour pouch, which you’re supposed to put your smartphone in when you leave it at home. I can’t quit the iPhone cold turkey, but I tossed the velour pouch in my bag on a beach trip, just in case. I used it for a few things, like ordering food and checking train times. But while I enjoyed a day on the beach, I didn’t take out my phone. I had a book, a sandwich, two bottles of water, some sunscreen — what else could I need?
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Tech
Disney+ is considering a free streaming tier, report says
Disney+ is considering making some of its streaming library available to watch for free, according to a report from Business Insider.
Disney’s chief product and technology officer Adam Smith discussed the possibility of offering free-tier content during a town hall on Thursday, the report says. It’s unknown which shows or movies would be included or when the streaming platform would consider launching the offering.
The rollout of free content would allow Disney+ to better compete with free services like YouTube and Tubi, which are capturing a growing share of consumers’ viewing time.
As streaming giants continue to raise prices, consumers have been turning to ad-supported services. According to data from Neilson, free streaming services represented 18.7% of U.S. television watch time in April 2026, rising from 16.8% in April 2025 and 12.7% in April 2024.
By offering select free content to consumers, Disney+ could better differentiate itself from its streaming peers like Netflix and Amazon Prime, especially as Apple TV+ and Paramount+ already allow non-subscribers to access a few free episodes.
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