Xreal One Pro review: Fancy smart glasses you can use with your iPhone

The Xreal One Pro isn’t the full smartglasses experience you’d like, but it still gives you a decent surround computing experience—provided you’re fine with a cable that slips into your pocket.

Apple has been rumored to be introducing its own smart glasses for years, but it still seems like a long time before they become a reality. While Apple is taking its time – as always – to perfect the form, others have entered the market.

The latest part from Xreal has arrived in the form of Xreal One Pro. Following on from the Xreal One from early 2025, the Xreal One Pro goes a few steps further by bringing gaming to the display.

In a market that has the 600 pound gorilla that Meta is making big moves, Xreal needs to push harder to make a dent in the market. Analysts still say that the so-called Apple Glass will arrive and saturate the rest of the market.

Today is not that day. Meanwhile, there’s the Xreal One Pro for people who wisely avoid the Meta ecosystem like the plague.

Xreal One Pro Review: Physical Design

The Xreal One Pro is a massive pair of sunglasses from the outside. Strong arms and frames are used to hide some of the electronics, but it cannot be completely hidden.

The arms hold Bose-powered speakers, as well as a USB-C port on the left hook for wired connections to other devices. On the right side is the brightness rocker and menu button below the sleeper and another shortcut button is at the top.

The black arms meet the front of the glasses with a small metal hinge on each side. This is nicely cushioned, I don’t expect any long term problems with it.

The main outer glass can be darkened to look like sunglasses or lightened to be more transparent. This is partly to help you see AR elements better, but also to give you some privacy when viewing content.

This shade hides a second set of lenses that appear in the frame, which is where the actual augmented reality display lives.

If you wear glasses, you will get mounting points to insert prescription lenses, which you will need to purchase separately. Not a big deal to anyone who has used other headsets, but a trip to the optometrist will be in order.

The bridge section also has fairly large nose pads that sit on metal arms and you can move them around for comfort. Xreal also includes three pairs of these silicone pads as they are effectively expandable.

Speaking of convenience, the One Pro weighs 3.1 ounces versus the 1.8 ounces that others in my house use. That weight is a far cry from a full headset like the Apple Vision Pro, but it’s still something you’ll notice wearing for long periods of time.

Xreal One Pro review: Display and sound

The main difference this time is in the display technology used. While the previous One used Sony’s 0.68-inch Micro OLED projector as its display, the new One Pro uses an updated 0.55-inch version.

Xreal’s new Optic Engine 4.0 uses a display that has a wider field of view of 57 degrees compared to the One’s 50 degrees. It manages even when the display element is reduced by 40 percent.

By comparison, the Apple Vision Pro’s field of view is about 100 degrees.

For the end user, this means an increase in the maximum display area, so the virtual screens are larger than in the previous model.

The new version is also much brighter with 700 nits compared to the previous model’s 600 nits. At 4 million pixels, an effective resolution of 1080p is available, which is about what you’d expect from an AR display of this type.

That’s a bigger difference than you think. From my experience with the previous model compared to this one, the extra brightness makes the unit much more usable in bright lights. But it doesn’t matter at all at dusk or at night.

There’s also a 120Hz refresh rate, similar to the non-Pro version, to reduce the risk of flickering and minimize motion sickness. Each headset is also color calibrated before shipping.

There are two sizes of Xreal One Pro when it comes to interpupillary distance (IPD) solutions. The medium has a 63mm center point and a 57mm to 66mm range, while the large has a 69mm center point and a 66mm to 75mm range.

For audio, there are new speakers over the One, which has a new sound chamber design. It is tuned by Bose engineers.

It can also record audio with stereo voice input for online meetings. Noise reduction can process your voice to be clearer in moderately noisy environments.

Xreal One Pro Review: Augmented Reality

Unlike a headset like the Apple Vision Pro, there is some processing on the device itself, but it’s not related to the content. However, it deals with how you view that content.

Similar to the screen, you connect your source content to the Xreal One Pro via a port, in this case a USB-C connection on the hook. Any device that can transmit a DisplayPort signal over USB-C can be used with the glasses.

This means you can connect most computers, modern smartphones and tablets, including the iPhone and iPad, and use it as an external display. If your host device does not have a USB-C connection or does not support it, there is an option to use an HDMI to USB-C adapter to do the same.

The real work the glasses do is positioning. Its built-in Xreal X1 chip handles placing content in virtual space so you can see it with your eyes.

It’s much more complex because it has to deal with your head movements and translate them into adjustments for the virtual screen. Handles the spatial bit of spatial computing.

This is mainly solved by the Anchor setting, which allows users to pin the display to one place in the room with three degrees of freedom. This can also take the form of an ultra-wide display, which Xreal says can be up to 310 virtual inches in size.

The other mode, Follow, is more straightforward as a floating display that stays in front of your face no matter where you look. Another side-view mode does the same thing, but in miniature, creating a small screen for the corner of your vision while you engage with real-world events.

All this is done without the need for a separate application to configure the display or to use the hub as an intermediate device. That’s a nice touch, I’m not a fan of a helper app to implement a display like this.

These settings can be managed using the included menu button, which gives you options for screen size, different modes, distance from your eyes, and even color temperature.

Xreal One Pro Review: Clear, Incomplete Vision

Xreal One Pro is an evolution of what came before it. But it’s not quite the augmented reality smart glasses experience everyone believes. As it is, it’s a display for your eyes that does the screen-in-air trick really well.

You can’t use it as a standalone headset, you’ll always have to use it with a host device.

And the cable that comes with it broke within days of arrival. Expect to need a better cable right off the bat. Fortunately, almost any USB-C cable will do here.

One big omission is the missing camera that slides under the bridge. The Xreal Eye is a 12MP camera that can be used to take pictures like Meta’s Ray-Ban partner glasses.

However, its real party piece is that it can upgrade the Xreal One Pro from 3 degrees of freedom to 6 degrees of freedom.

This is a missing feature that could certainly improve the user experience, but instead comes as part of a $99 add-on. It’s something that really should have been part of the “Pro” product, but is now becoming an afterthought.

Another missing aspect is wireless usage. There is another add-on in Xreal Beam Pro, but it is not included in the entry price. In theory, a wireless USB-C HDMI adapter can also be used, but this is bulky and impractical.

And Beam Pro is an Android device. Pass.

With off-device content processing absolutely necessary, the Xreal One Pros are definitely not what you’d consider full-fledged smart glasses. That said, it’s certainly a neat head-mounted display that can do some spatial display tricks and can even take photos if you add a camera to it.

Its overall larger viewable area is a welcome advantage over its predecessor, but it’s still a relatively small change to the overall design.

But even so, as a device that you physically attach to an iPhone or iPad to see its display floating in the air, it’s still not the experience people typically expect from a smartglasses experience.

Xreal One Pro

• It looks like a chunky, dimmable pair of sunglasses
• Smaller but bigger and better display area
• Relatively light construction

Cons of Xreal One Pro

• Requires host to display content, no on-device content processing
• 6 degrees of freedom requires an optional camera
• The included cable is terrible, get a better one

Rating: 3 out of 5

The Xreal One Pro is optically excellent hardware, weighed down by the cable and lack of wireless streaming from the host device. It’s fun to use and obviously lighter than the Apple Vision Pro, but for the extra cost you have to pay for wireless streaming and a camera, it has a very specific market that I’m not sure exists right now.

Where to buy Xreal One Pro

The Xreal One Pro is available direct from Xreal for $599.99. It is also available from Amazon for $599.