Forty eight hours with Snapchat Spectacles.
I'm rich Jimiro. This is rich on Tech Daily.
Snapchat is added again with a new and improved pair of spectacles. These are their sunglasses with a tiny little camera built into them. The company lent me a pair for just forty eight hours to try them out, and I'll say I had a blast with them. For starters, I never really wore the first pair of spectacles for a very long time. I had access to them for a very short Show and Tell TV segment, so I wasn't really able to form a good opinion on them. Also,
I wasn't really very interested in them. The reviews I read were pretty bad, and I wasn't a big snapchatter.
So I really did not see the use case scenario.
Snap says they sold two hundred and twenty thousand pairs of the first generation product, and they say they learned a few things in the process because the media said that they were a flop. Now, the new spectacles are thinner and lighter due to even more miniaturization of the electronics inside. Snap says the part that holds most of the gadget tree, which is above the temples, is about
a third small overall. They also come in three colors, a black, a red, and a blue, and they are actual sunglasses.
They are UVA and UVB rated.
Spectacles come in a case that resembles a tennis ball can. You pop the top and you slide the glasses out, which are inside a yellow case. This case doubles as a portable charger. You charge it up by plugging it in. Then when you're out and about, you can pop your spectacles back in the case and they'll recharge.
Overall, I was able.
To take about seventy five ten second clips before my spectacles needed recharging. The battery is definitely gonna last a day, maybe a bit longer, depending on how much you use them.
As for setup, it was a breeze.
You just open the Snapchat app and let it know that you have a new pair of spectacles, and it pretty much does the rest. They use a combination of Bluetooth and Wi Fi to talk to your phone. They are compatible with both iOS and Android, although I tested them with an iPhone ten. Once you're connected, you just go about your business and when you want to take a video, you press a little button on the side of the glasses. They instantly start recording a ten second clip.
Others know you're recording because there's a light on the opposite side to the camera. You can extend your recording time to thirty seconds by hitting the button a second time, and a long press will take a snapshot. Getting your videos and images to your phone is super simple. Every time I would capture something on the Spectacles, I would get a notification on my iPhone that the clips were ready to import. One more tap would bring me into the Snapchat app, and one more tap.
Would start copying over all the clips to my phone.
Now, one of the big complaints about the first generation of Spectacles is that the transfers weren't very fast.
Snap says, this process has been improved.
Transfers are about four times faster, and I didn't think it took very long at all. In fact, I was very impressed. It was using a Wi Fi direct connection, which is very speedy.
Now.
As for the quality of the clips, well, they look great. Everything's in HD. When you're viewing in Snapchat, your video fills the entire screen. And what's really cool is even as you rotate your phone to portrait or landscape, the video still fills the screen.
It's a really neat little effect.
Everything you transfer is saved privately to Snapshot until you decide to share it publicly with your friends on the platform. I found the delineation between the two to be pretty clear, so I don't expect to see a lot of mistake and shares. If you want to get your captured moments out of Snapchat, well that's pretty easy too. You can export to your camera roll and seconds. The only problem here is what your video looks like when you export it.
It's a circular image surrounded by a big white box. And you can still zoom in and crop your videos and images to fill the entire screen, but that does take a few extra steps and you might lose some of the stuff on the edges of the image, and also the quality suffers a bit.
Other things to know about spectacles.
They're not super comfortable to wear for long periods of times, so you're probably not going to be able to replace your sunglasses with them. I took a run with the spectacles and they felt kind of heavy on my head after a while. You also might get some second takes from folks wondering what you're wearing, because they do have kind of a distinct look to them, and they're also
water resistant. This time around, I did not jump in a pool to try this out, but it was raining, which is crazy for la The day I tested them near Venice Beach and they did just fine. Overall, having a pair of Spectacles is an absolute blast. There's so many fun little moments in life you can capture with them from such unique It's literally like having a little
GoPro on your face at all times. In fact, I don't know what GoPros thinking these days, but maybe they need to team up with Snapchat for a go pro version of these glasses.
Maybe a go pro glasses action cam kind of thing. Now.
A lot of people might think the Spectacles are best for teens or the younger set, but to me, the best use case scenario might be new parents or parents in general.
You never know what your.
Kids are gonna do, and these can definitely help you capture that. One thing to note about the captures, none of them include the person actually wearing the spectacles. This sort of flies in the face of the selfie culture we live in. Lots of snaps and Instagram stories are captured with the camera facing the author. Spectacles makes this a little tricky, although I was able to take them off all I was recording and aim them back at myself and it made.
A pretty good image.
Bottom line, spectacles are a fun and unique way to capture life's little moments, but you have to be a super dedicated snap fan to invest the one hundred and fifty dollars to purchase them. If you're planning on using them to share to other platforms, like if you're a big Instagram Stories person, you're going to grow frustrated pretty quickly at the extra steps involved, and then you're going to stop using them. This will probably limit the wide
appeal of these new and improved spectacles. But still, even after forty eight hours, I'm convinced Snap is onto something and we're going to continue to see this technology perfected and camera glasses will play a big role in the future of video capture.
Thanks so much for listening.
If you like to rich on Tech podcast, please rate and review it in the Apple Podcast step. That way more people see it and follow me on Instagram. My username is at rich on Tech. I know, did I just promote my Instagram in a story about Snapchat? Kind of crazy? You can find a link to everything I mentioned here, including my Snapchat Spectacles review, on my website.
Just go to rich on tech dot tv.
There you can also see a bunch of clips of videos I took with the Spectacles.
I'm Rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you real soon