Smart glasses: The next hot digital device?

"Apple plans smart glasses for 2026 as part of AI Push", read the headline of an article in this newspaper (May 26, 2025).

- AMBI PARAMESWARAN

With Meta having stolen the lead with its Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, Apple has its task cut out. Can it do to the smart glasses market what it did with mobile phones when it launched the iPhone in June 2007?

Looking back, Apple was not the first to launch a mobile phone. Brands such as Nokia, Motorola and Sony had beaten it to it. BlackBerry had the enterprise market in its vice-like grip, with even Barack Obama as US President swearing by it. Apple managed to upstage all its competitors who had believed that you needed to offer a keyboard on a mobile device. In fact, BlackBerry swore by its qwerty keyboard, and was unable to dump it even when the writing was on the wall. Nokia, too, did not respond fast enough as Apple changed the language of mobile phones by creating a new term: smartphone.

Apple's secret—or not so secret—sauce was its App Store, which allowed third parties to develop and sell apps to Apple iPhone users. In the wake of this smartphone wave, brands like BlackBerry, Nokia, Sony, and even Motorola, faced rapid decline. It was left to Samsung to create exciting smartphones that used the Google-created Android platform.