There’s one fact of life that we just have to accept about today’s XR glasses: nobody looks cool in them. So if we’re going to compare devices like the Snap Specs and the Xreal Aura, we’re not ranking them on dorkiness. It’s a case of pure usability, not pure innovation, that will determine which one will be put in front of your eyes.

Collectively, Gizmodo’s consumer tech team has spent way too much time sitting with wearable screens inches from our eyes. Meta’s VR Glasses, announced Wednesday, are promising yet another realm of more-portable AR. We’ve already talked extensively about both Xreal’s Aura and Snap Specs, so we don’t need to sit here and rehash everything. At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, I used both, one after the other, and there’s only one that feels built for the current moment.

The first thing you’ll want to know is what Xreal told me about the battery life for Aura. With the connected compute and battery puck at full charge, the company told me they can get around four hours of use with typical passive or active experiences, whether that’s watching video or running various Android apps. They may get as much as five hours with simple productivity work, and potentially more if you’re only mirroring a screen from your laptop or gaming device like a Steam Deck.

Snap promised a similar battery life on its Specs of around four hours with mixed use. I don’t have the capacity to test either for as long as I would need to.

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