# A $449 challenger out-shoots Meta and still says wait

Source: https://idevice.com/a-449-challenger-out-shoots-meta-and-still-says-wait
Published: 2026-08-24

> L'Atitude 52°N puts a 12-megapixel Sony sensor and landscape video into a pair of camera glasses, beating what Meta ships. Android Headlines' reviewer still says hold off: the frame slides, the assistant is thin, and the battery drains flat in standby.

A startup's $449 smart glasses out-shoot Meta's, and the reviewer still tells you to wait.

Alexander Maxham tested the L'Atitude 52°N Berlin frames for Android Headlines, which is so far the only outlet to publish a full review of them. The company is staffed mostly by former OnePlus engineers, and the camera is where that background shows. A 12-megapixel Sony IMX681 sensor with a 107-degree field of view fits into a housing smaller than the one Meta uses, and it shoots landscape as well as portrait. Meta's glasses shoot portrait only. Video runs to three minutes on both.

Everything you record on Meta's glasses today comes back framed for a phone screen, which is fine for a story and useless for anything you want to keep. A pair of glasses that can shoot wide is a camera you would actually reach for, which is the whole argument for putting one on your face.

Then there is the rest of the product, and Maxham is blunt about it. The frame is glossy plastic that he says feels cheap next to his Ray-Ban Wayfarers. There is no adjustable nose bridge, so the glasses slide down and he spends the day pushing them back up. There is no route to prescription lenses at purchase, so wearers are sent to a third party for measurements or to contact lenses, which he says every other pair he has used handles in the box. The onboard assistant, called Goya, cannot answer a question as plain as what the weather is unless you also name the city. Walking through Manhattan he could barely hear a podcast over the traffic.

The battery is the part that would send them back.

L'Atitude claims six hours on the glasses and about 66 hours from the charging case, and Maxham got roughly that in use. What he did not get was standby. He came home from a trip to New York, left the glasses in their case for a week, picked them up to write the review and found both the glasses and the case flat. His Ray-Bans, he notes, hold a charge in standby for months. The case itself is waterproof and big, holds around ten charges, and empties itself while nobody is wearing anything. Twenty minutes of charging gets the glasses back to 70 percent, which is the mitigation rather than the fix.

Maxham reviewed a pre-shipping firmware build and flags that himself, and the disconnects he hit while talking to the assistant on a Pixel 11 Pro are the kind of thing a software update closes. The camera is silicon already in the frame, and already better than the thing everyone else is buying.

The glasses ship in five to seven business days, and Maxham's own advice is to hold off on a first-generation buy.