XREAL Air AR Glasses Review: Real-World Use After Months of Daily Wear

What it is actually like to live with the XREAL Air

Rather than doing a typical unboxing and first-look at the XREAL Air AR glasses (formerly Nreal), which plenty of other reviewers have covered, I wanted to share my personal experience of owning these glasses through months of daily use. Below are the positives, the negatives, and the real-world challenges I ran into, so you can decide whether they are worth your money and your time.

It is worth noting up front that my observations come from the perspective of a PC and Android user. That said, most of what I cover applies across different platforms and manufacturers. With that out of the way, let us start with what I think is the most significant issue with these glasses.

The battery problem: these glasses have no battery of their own

The one major drawback with the XREAL Air is the lack of an internal battery. The glasses draw all of their power from whatever device they are plugged into. Connect them to your phone and you will notice a real dent in its battery. Using my Samsung S21 Ultra as the power source, the glasses drained roughly 5% of the phone every ten minutes. Even from a full charge, that means the phone and glasses together last only about two hours. There is a dongle solution that passes power and display through to both the phone and the glasses, but the setup is cumbersome and inconvenient. It is a compromise that keeps the glasses light instead of bulky. Maybe a future XREAL adapter will pass power without the tangle of cables and dongles, but only time will tell.

Plug the glasses into a laptop or desktop instead and the battery issue mostly disappears, since laptops have far larger batteries and desktops have effectively unlimited power. Speaking of desktops, there is another wrinkle there, and fortunately there is a solution.

Connecting the XREAL Air to a desktop PC

I have written a whole post on how to connect the XREAL Air to a desktop PC, but the short version is this: if your desktop has a discrete graphics card and no USB-C ports with video output, you will need a specialized cable to connect the glasses. It is a USB-powered DisplayPort-to-USB-C cable, which is different from the HDMI version some people mistakenly reach for. Most modern laptops work out of the box. Even my five-year-old HP Envy runs the glasses perfectly over its USB port. XREAL really should communicate this better, because the developers often say direct PC connection is not supported, yet this one cable resolved every issue on my system, which runs an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080.

An unexpected win: less neck strain on walks

Two benefits I did not expect are worth calling out. First, when I take my regular walks to get away from the computer, I no longer have to stare down at my phone. I put on the glasses and look straight ahead, which has actually reduced the strain on my neck from constantly looking down.

Second is the freedom for my hands. I can keep watching something through the glasses while my hands are free to do other things, instead of gripping a phone the whole time. It is a small thing that turned out to matter a lot day to day.

Nebula for PC: virtual monitors on Windows

At the time of writing, the Nebula app for Windows was still in beta, but I found it genuinely impressive. It does exactly what you need: it sets up virtual screens, lets you zoom in and out within the limits of the glasses' 46° field of view, and adjusts settings as needed. It is a simple but effective app that works perfectly on my PC. Your experience may vary, and I am curious to see what features XREAL adds next.

The prescription lens frame for glasses wearers

For those of us who wear glasses, XREAL includes a corrective lens frame. You take that frame to a third party who makes custom prescription lenses for it. Wearing your normal glasses under the XREAL Air is impractical because of the fit, so these custom lenses are essentially required. Getting them made ran me about $50. There are not many vendors offering the service, but I found one that worked well, and the lenses greatly improved the experience, especially after I recently updated my prescription.

Productivity on the go: three virtual screens

One of the main reasons I bought these glasses was the promise of a productivity boost without hauling around extra physical monitors. I actually bought them before the Windows Nebula app existed, but I followed the team's progress and knew it was coming. Despite the limited field of view, which cuts into peripheral vision, I can still set up three virtual screens and switch between them just by glancing left or right. They cannot yet replace my dual-monitor setup at home, but on the road, with all three virtual screens live, they are genuinely useful. I would love a future model with a wider FOV so I could run one real monitor plus two virtual ones and truly declutter my desk. Until then, I am satisfied with the current setup.

The Nebula phone app, and why I use Samsung DeX instead

I spent time with the Nebula phone app on Android. It felt fun and novel at first, but the novelty wore off quickly once I tried to actually use the bundled apps, especially entertainment ones like YouTube. The pointing feature and the floating virtual panels are enjoyable to play with, but in the end I turned the app off from launching whenever I connect the glasses to my phone. Instead I use Samsung's DeX on my Samsung devices, which works seamlessly. With DeX I use the phone screen as a touchpad while everything I am doing appears through the glasses.

Price: about $400, and why that felt fair

The XREAL Air carries an early-adopter price, but I was pleasantly surprised it only ran about $400, especially next to Apple's Vision Pro. The XREAL glasses lack basically all of the Vision Pro's advanced features, yet they deliver a similar big-screen experience at a fraction of the cost. As the technology matures, I expect devices like this to get even cheaper while offering comparable or better features.

Should you buy the XREAL Air glasses?

Whether the XREAL Air is right for you comes down to your specific needs. Personally, I was drawn to the health side of things, like being able to walk around without constantly looking down at my phone, though that benefit will vary from person to person. The productivity side did not fully meet my expectations because of the limited field of view, and I still wish for more clarity on detailed work like website development. Where the glasses truly shine for me now is entertainment. I thought the price was high at first, but weighed against the Apple Vision Pro it felt justified. Back when I wrote this, if my pair had broken and could not be fixed under warranty, I would have bought them again.

The glasses need improvements, like a wider FOV and a better power solution, but those are the compromises of early-generation hardware, and I was confident future models would address them. If you are curious about augmented reality and want to explore this emerging tech, the XREAL Air was an easy one to recommend. What changed since then is worth its own section.

Why I switched to the VITURE Luma Pro

I did not abuse these. There was no drop and no accident. It was a slow structural failure: the constant folding and unfolding fatigued the plastic right past the metal reinforcement in the hinge, and now the only thing holding an arm on is the cable running to the speakers. They slide off my face and no amount of glue is going to fix that for long. So it was time for an upgrade, and that is where the VITURE Luma Pro comes in.

Rather than buy another XREAL, I switched, and the Luma Pro happens to fix several of the exact complaints from this review. The USB-C port on the XREAL was a fixed point of failure; VITURE uses a magnetic Pogo-pin cable that simply pops off if you snag it. The hinges are a reinforced, aviation-grade mechanism that moves more freely, and the frame has better airflow, where my XREAL used to run hot on the left temple, which I suspect made the plastic brittle. On the battery front, watching YouTube on the treadmill for 20 minutes drained my phone by roughly 8%, versus the 15% I saw with the XREAL. Best of all for glasses wearers, the Luma Pro has built-in diopter dials down to -4.00D, so there are no more $50 third-party prescription inserts. The image is sharper too, and the Harman speakers sound great out of the box.

These weren't a novelty for me. When they broke, I realized just how much I relied on them.

The switch is not perfect. Connecting the Luma Pro to a desktop with a discrete GPU is still a headache, because it uses a proprietary cable and most desktop graphics cards have no USB-C video output at all. That is the same class of problem the WJESOG cable solved for the XREAL, and I go through the full VITURE desktop workaround separately. For the honest, complete rundown of the image quality, audio, fit, and that desktop setup, read my full VITURE Luma Pro review.