Smart glasses are the new thing on the block, but don't expect the Colmi G06 to be the ones to take you inside the warm glow of what's possible in this form factor. The G06 can brag about its ability to handle phone calls for days at a time, but we still wouldn't recommend picking these up over say, a proper pair of earbuds.
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Design
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Features
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Audio
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Controls
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Battery
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Value
The world may pay more attention to the work being done by Meta in the smart glasses space, but what about the people who don’t have five figures for a glorified pair of specs? These are the sort of clientele companies like Colmi are targeting, which admittedly may have drifted too far in the opposite direction.
We’re talking about Colmi’s G06 smart glasses, which demand a not-minuscule sacrifice of R2,000 before they’ll sit on your face. We’ve spent a couple of weeks with Colmi’s (technically) budget offering that is part protection from the sun, part Bluetooth earpiece from 2006 (and part selfie stick?). But, you know, less douchey.
Does it come in black?
It’d be the ultimate own goal if Colmi made a wearable that wasn’t at least somewhat comfortable on your face, and we’re glad to say the G06 doesn’t fumble. Even with our fairly large head, the G06 clung on comfortably without complaint from its end. It’s still in one piece, anyway.
Our review model sports a brown coating we weren’t thrilled about. There’s just something about the golden brown colourway that lights that sucker up — an issue we’re confident would be offset by the black option. Despite our aversion to the colour and the peek at the innards on the Go6’s arms, the overall effect was rather pleasant.
Regardless of your colour choice, you’ll be treated to a fat pair of arms and even fatter bezels that’ll have you looking like Martin Scorsese, minus the wealth. That’s not a knock on the G06. If you’re personally offended by thicker-than-usual specs, then you won’t love Colmi’s effort. We do, so we did. Get it?
No tactile buttons besmirch the relatively small area Colmi had to work with, and for that, we’re grateful. The specs rely instead on touch sensors built into the frame. Ditto for the charging ports, which allow the glasses to absorb power through two tiny magnetic attachments on each arm. These are tucked on the underside of each, meaning they generally won’t be visible to you or others unless you already know where to look.
Get smart
First, we should probably tell you what Colmi’s specs claim to do. As a budget offering, they avoid all the fancy tricks of other companies and stick to the basics: playing music, talking on the phone and… taking pictures? No, the Go6 doesn’t have a camera built-in. This is the kind that expects your smartphone to be propped up nearby, ready to start snapping. All you’re doing is telling it when with the built-in touch sensor.
Mostly, it succeeds at these goals. It held up to the pressures of a proper phone call, with the tinny little speakers exceeding expectations even when out in public or the car with the windows down. It’s there where the G06 shone brightest, making up for our vehicle’s lack of Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, or even native Bluetooth. What we got was a solid hands-free experience, even if it was a smidge too quiet.
Although the speakers embedded into the arms worked well on our end, it wouldn’t be much use if the microphone couldn’t reciprocate. Fortunately, these do. We handed the Go6 to a friend so that we could get a taste of our own medicine, and liked what we heard. The experience might technically have been better had we spoken into the lower end of our smartphone, but that would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?
Connectivity was another plus, requiring no more than a quick Bluetooth scan to get them properly. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have any troubles. When it came to answering calls or snapping pictures with the tap of a frame, the G06 failed to consistently follow through on these tasks. Eventually, we gave up and stuck to the controls on our smartphone. It’s no dealbreaker, but its absence could’ve lowered the price even further.
Colmi’s in charge of the situation
Colmi’s promises of a 100mAh battery in each of the G06’s arms may not fill you with a lot of confidence. It didn’t for us, anyway. We weren’t thrilled at the thought of charging these every other day. Our fears were all for nought. The G06 features some pretty smart detection features, turning itself on when on your face, and off when it’s left alone for a couple of seconds.
This, coupled with the fact that we mostly wore these while driving (an hour or so at a time), we only needed to give the specs a proper charge roughly every week and a half. If you plan to wear these out for an entire day, however, you’ll probably only get around 3.5 hours of uptime, assuming you’re blasting music or listening in on a very long call. Let them sit idly, and it’ll extend that to roughly 5 hours.
Colmi G06 smart glasses verdict
Squeeze these features inside a reasonably stylish pair of specs that’ll keep your eyes safe from the sun, and Colmi’s got a winner on its hands here, considering the R2,000 asking price. It stumbles when it comes to hit-or-miss touch controls, and we’d never hear the end of it from this guy if these were to replace a traditional pair of buds. But the bits it does right – like hands-free calling and battery life – it does really right.
Still, it’s difficult to justify the Colmi G06. Their audio and battery chops, while impressive for budget smart glasses, can’t touch a pair of earbuds, which can often be found for a fair bit cheaper than what Colmi asks, and offer better audio to boot. The G06s have their place on the faces of people who make a lot of phone calls on the go (and still want to hear the world around them), but the average Joe… not so much.
