Halliday Gen 2 Glasses: No Camera, $599, Waveguide Display
24 Jul 2026
Smart glasses are having a moment, and two very different bets on the category just became clearer. Halliday opened preorders for its Gen 2 smart glasses today, while Samsung showed off new smart glasses designs built with Google, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker. Together, they sketch out two competing visions for what AI-powered eyewear should look — and cost — like.
What's new with Halliday Gen 2
Halliday's second-generation glasses swap the original's movable display window for a waveguide display — a notable hardware shift. The new display is monochrome green, with 600x300 pixel resolution per eye and up to 1,600 nits of brightness. A four-microphone array handles voice input, but there's no camera on the device.
On the software side, Halliday is leaning into productivity: Gen 2 introduces Meeting Flow, Thread Tracker, Decision Confirmation, and Commitment Check features, alongside real-time translation support for more than 45 languages. Battery life is rated at roughly 12 hours of typical use.
Pricing is set at $599, with preorders open today for a $10 deposit. Early customers get a $100 discount off the full price. Halliday expects to ship Gen 2 in September, though an exact date hasn't been specified.
The author previously tried Halliday's original glasses at CES 2025 during a 30-minute demo, giving some hands-on context for how the product has evolved into this second generation.
Samsung's parallel push
Separately, Samsung revealed two additional smart glasses designs, adding to two models already shown at Google I/O in May. These are being developed in partnership with Google, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker — pairing Samsung's hardware with established eyewear fashion brands.
Samsung's glasses run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chip and support either Google Gemini or Bixby for AI features. Battery life is rated at up to 9 hours, with the charging case providing 7 additional charges. Notably, the glasses include a recording LED that blocks recording if it's obscured — a privacy safeguard also found in Meta's glasses, which use the same chip. Samsung's line is due to launch this fall, with more frame designs planned. No pricing has been disclosed yet.
Two different bets
The report notes no direct conflicts between these two product stories — they're simply different approaches to the same emerging category. Halliday is betting on a cameraless, productivity- and translation-focused device at a fixed $599 price point. Samsung is betting on fashion partnerships, camera-equipped hardware, and AI assistant integration, without yet revealing price.
Risks worth watching
Halliday's monochrome, low-resolution display could limit the range of visual content it can support, and the lack of a camera may mean it falls short on feature parity with camera-equipped rivals like Samsung and Meta. At $599 — even with the $100 preorder discount — price could be a barrier for early adopters weighing cheaper alternatives. Samsung, meanwhile, is leaning on a single fall launch window, and hardware timelines in this category have a track record of slipping.
Several gaps remain unresolved: there's no Samsung pricing yet, no clarity on how Halliday's lack of a camera affects its AI or translation accuracy versus camera-equipped competitors, no comparative detail on waveguide display cost or performance, and no information on production volume or regional availability for either product.
Why founders should care
For early-stage hardware and wearables founders, this likely signals a few shifts worth tracking. The move to waveguide displays may suggest that leading players are prioritizing lighter, more integrated optics over swappable display modules — a possible signal for where display supply chains and component costs are headed. Halliday's decision to skip a camera could plausibly reflect either a privacy-first positioning or a cost-reduction strategy, and founders building competing hardware may want to watch which approach resonates with buyers once Gen 2 ships.
The $10 deposit / $100 discount preorder structure is also a demand-validation tactic that early-stage hardware teams could reasonably borrow before committing to full production runs — it lets a company gauge real purchase intent with minimal upfront cost to the buyer.
More broadly, having Halliday, Samsung, and Meta all shipping or previewing smart glasses in roughly the same season suggests competitive density in this category is increasing, which could compress differentiation windows for smaller entrants. And the recurring appearance of recording-LED safeguards across brands hints that privacy features may be becoming a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator — something founders in this space should probably plan for by default rather than treat as optional.