Samsung has opened pre-orders for Intelligent Eyewear, its first smart glasses, in Korea and the United States. They ship on 10 December.

Pricing starts at $395 for frames designed with Warby Parker. The Gentle Monster collection runs from $449 to $489. Korean buyers get the Gentle Monster range only, priced between 650,000 and 700,000 won including VAT. There are 30 frame styles across the two brands.

$395Starting price
41gWeight
10 DecShipping date

What Is Inside

The glasses run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 with 2 GB of memory and 64 GB of storage, although Samsung has not formally confirmed those last two figures. There is a 12-megapixel forward-facing camera, four microphones and two open-ear speakers.

At roughly 41 grams they are heavier than ordinary glasses and lighter than most of the camera glasses that came before them. Samsung quotes up to nine hours of use, rising to about 72 hours when you count the charging case.

These are not display glasses. There is no screen in the lens and nothing projected into your field of view. The camera, the speakers and the assistant do the work, which is also why the battery figures look plausible rather than optimistic.

The recording light is the point. An outward-facing LED lights up while the camera is running. It is the single feature that decides how these are received in public, and Samsung has chosen to make it visible rather than discreet.

They Are Not Galaxy-Only

The compatibility list is wider than Samsung's usual. Galaxy S, S FE, Z Fold and Z Flip models running One UI 9 are supported, which is expected. So are the Google Pixel 7 and newer, and the iPhone 13 Pro and newer, which is not.

That is a deliberate decision and a departure from how Samsung has handled the Galaxy Watch and the Galaxy Buds, where the best features have historically needed a Galaxy phone. Bixby is the one holdout here, working only with Galaxy handsets.

Opening up to iPhone users makes commercial sense for a product category still trying to prove it has an audience. A pair of glasses that only works with one phone brand starts from a much smaller pool of buyers.

Samsung has shipped accessories that punish you for not owning a Galaxy phone. This is not one of them.

On the compatibility list

What We Do Not Know Yet

How well any of it works. Pre-order pages are marketing, and smart glasses have a long history of demonstrating beautifully and disappointing in daily use.

The questions worth holding until reviews arrive are the ordinary ones. Does the assistant respond quickly enough to be worth talking to, does the camera produce anything you would keep, do the open-ear speakers work on a noisy street, and does the nine-hour rating survive contact with a normal day.

What Samsung has got right on paper is the price. At $395 these undercut most of what else is on sale, and for a first-generation product in a category people are still unsure about, that matters more than the specification sheet.