Solos Bets on Featherweight Glasses and Privacy Shields to Take On Meta

Nineteen grams. That's the weight Solos is chasing with its newly announced AirGo A6, an audio-only smart glasses model designed to undercut the bulk that has defined the smart eyewear category so far. The figure isn't just a marketing footnote: it roughly halves the weight of Solos' own AirGo A5, which ran between 36 and 40 grams, and it lands well below the 54 to nearly 60 grams of the Meta Glasses Meta unveiled just a month earlier.

For a product category still trying to convince people to wear a computer on their face all day, weight is a real differentiator. Solos is positioning the A6 as a device built for comfort first, with full prescription lens compatibility and several frame styles, including a transparent option that avoids the tech-forward look many smart glasses default to. Rather than cameras, the A6 leans on voice: a hands-free AI assistant handles spoken questions, real-time translation, and calendar reminders, keeping the feature set focused on audio interaction instead of visual capture.

A Privacy Pitch Aimed Squarely at Meta

Alongside the A6, Solos rolled out privacy accessories for its camera-equipped AirGo V2 line, which debuted last year with the explicit goal of outshining Meta's smart glasses push. The V2, priced at $299, offers photo and video capture, music playback, AI assistant access, and a battery life of 10 to 12 hours. The company's answer to camera-anxiety comes in the form of a $49 clip-on privacy shield, or a $79 bundle that pairs the shield with polarized sunglasses. It's a hardware fix for a problem that's largely been treated as a software or policy issue elsewhere in the industry.

That contrast matters given what's happening at Meta. The company is currently navigating multiple lawsuits and investigations tied to its AI glasses, including litigation stemming from the cancellation of an outsourcing contract after Kenyan workers alleged they were forced to review graphic content while training Meta's AI systems. Meta has responded on the hardware side by adding a safeguard that disables the camera if its recording-indicator LED is tampered with or physically blocked. Yet reporting also indicates Meta is testing prototype glasses that would continuously capture audio while snapping photos every few seconds, a detail that sits uneasily next to the company's public safety messaging.

Solos, a smaller player, is using that tension as an opening. Its AirGo Vision camera glasses launched back in 2024, giving the company a couple of years of head start in figuring out how to market always-on wearable cameras without triggering the backlash Meta is now facing. Whether a clip-on shield changes user behavior in any meaningful way is untested, but it signals a company betting that privacy controls, not just AI features, will decide who wins the next round of the smart glasses race.

The competitive field is also getting more crowded. Google and Samsung are jointly building out the Android XR platform, with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster expected to ship glasses on that platform later in 2026. That puts Solos in the position of needing to differentiate quickly, before larger platform players with bigger distribution networks arrive.