Skip to main content

Razer’s Anzu Bluetooth audio smartglasses aren’t just for gamers

Gaming company Razer is the latest to jump onboard the trend of audio smartglasses with the newly announced Razer Anzu Smart Glasses, its first eyewear product. The Anzu aren’t just your typical pair of smart sunglasses. They serve a purpose that’s relevant not only to gamers — Razer’s core fanbase — but to anyone working from home, by blocking out blue light and being versatile enough to be used indoors and out.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

The Anzu’s clear lenses block 35% of blue light, to reduce glare and eyestrain, and its sunglass lenses cut out 99% of UVA and UVB light. Razer has done the right thing and not forced you to choose which set of lenses best suits your lifestyle, and instead just bundled both sets inside the box, leaving you to swap them depending on your need. A very good idea.

Recommended Videos

In the arms are 16mm drivers ready to deliver sound to your ears, without actually having to put something in your ears. It’s the same concept as the Bose Frames, Huawei’s Eyewear II, and a growing number of competing products. The arms have touch-sensitive controls that allow you to play or pause music, answer calls, or summon a virtual assistant. The Anzu smartglasses connect to an app on your Android or iOS phone, where an equalizer adjusts the sound from the speakers, plus gamers can tweak the Bluetooth latency time, too.

Latency can be a problem for Bluetooth audio devices, especially when watching videos or playing games. The Anzu glasses use Bluetooth 5.1 and promise a 60ms latency time. The glasses also have an omnidirectional microphone for calls and chat during gaming. The battery should last for five hours on a single charge.

There are two different designs, a round pair and a rectangular pair, each coming in black. Interestingly, there are two different sizes of each version, too. One size does not fit all when it comes to eyewear, so the more options the better, and most brands tend to only provide different styles, rather than different sizes. Also, Razer is making it easier to fit the Anzu glasses with prescription lenses, having struck a partnership with Lensabl. Lenses for the Anzu can be ordered using an online vision test, and there’s a 15% discount for Anzu owners.

The direction the company has taken is interesting, giving this emerging, but already tired trend some much-needed relevance to more people. Providing both sets of lenses and making a prescription option simple should make them more tempting, too. Razer’s Anzu audio smartglasses cost $200, or 210 euros, and will be available to purchase through Razer’s own online store starting today.

Andy Boxall
Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…
Nvidia’s RTX 3080 sold out within minutes — and gamers aren’t happy
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 in front of a black background.

Following the disastrous PlayStation 5 pre-order debacle, it was Nvidia's turn to disappoint gamers around the world.

Across multiple sites, nearly every model of the new GeForce RTX 3080 is out of stock. And those looking to buy are not happy. In fact, pre-orders went so quickly, some online are wondering if they even happened at all?

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more