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Solos Smart Glasses

304 bytes added, 17:26, 1 May 2020
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* If Solos stops supporting these glasses, they're useless without the App. If they supported the Garmin remote display, they'd be useful even if the company support disappeared.
* It's not clear if Solos are still in business. Their support email address bounces and their customer support number is disconnected. The certificate for https://solos-wearables.com/ expired April 14, 2020 which indicates their web site is not being adequately managed (it's 4/21/2020 as I write.) Their last "in the news" update was May 20, 2019, and there are no updates to their Twitter or Facebook accounts in over a year.
* The display is tricky to see. While part of the problem is the glasses bouncing slightly as I run, that's not the main issue. To understand how the display works, imaging putting your cell phone in the bottom of a cereal box. If you look directly into the box, you can see fine, but move your head up or down and the top of the box will clip the screen. That's what happens a lot with the Solos. You are looking down a clear plastic pipe that transmits and reflects the display that's off to the side. The solos display arm has several bendable joints which allow you to align the display, but I found they didn't have enough adjustment. Running with Powerbeats Pro makes things worse as these earbuds have arms over your ears, which compete with the Solos arms for space over your ears.
* The software feels like a late beta rather than a polished product.
* It's not clear if there are coding problems or if the glasses lack processing power. The controls to change display are unpredictably unresponsive. Sometimes the display will update in a second or so, other times it can take more than 30 seconds. Sometime the screen only half update, showing me half of one metric at the top and the half of another metric at the bottom.
* The glasses don't have folding arms, which makes storage and transportation trickier. I worry about breaking them.
* The nose bridge is sticky and stays in place well unless you're sweating heavily.
* The battery life is short, though it's probably plenty for most runners. I found the battery lasted about 5 hours without playing any audio and in warm weather, but only just over 4 hours with audio streaming.
* The Solos can be charged in use, which makes them viable for ultrarunning. In my testing, they seemed to recharge fairly quickly, so you wouldn't have to run with them plugged in for long.
* There are two lenses: a dark gray for sun and a yellow for low light. The yellow is not idea for running in the dark, and the display is a little brighter than I'd like when running at night.
* The addition of speakers and microphone increase cost, weight, size, and complexity. I really wished they hadn't bothered.
* Having another Bluetooth headset paired is annoying when you want to use a quality headset. I have the Apple Powerbeats Pro, and I must manually select the audio output device.
* The built-in speakers sound like a cheap radio playing in the next room. They have earbudsconnected by a USB cable to the glasses. The earbuds are like the earbuds that come with an iPhone; not terrible, but I've not tried those yetgreat either.
* The microphone can be used to voice control the display, but not your phone. So, no Siri integration for when I'm playing music.
* The screen appears to be about arm's length away. This means your eyes change focus point when moving between the screen and the ground.

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