XREAL’s Aura Finally Has a Price. It’s $1,279, and You Can’t Buy One Yet.

XREAL has been taking deposits on the Aura without telling anyone what it would cost. Today the company filled in the blank. The Android XR glasses start at $1,279, and the larger configuration is $1,499.

If that sounds like phone money, it is. The catch is that you probably can't spend it yet. Preorders opened only to people who already put down a reservation deposit. Everybody else waits for what XREAL calls "the coming weeks," which is not a date.

What $1,279 gets you

The Aura comes in two configurations: 12GB of RAM with 256GB of storage, or 16GB with 512GB.

Both run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon Reality Elite. The glasses come in under 95 grams, which is the number that counts for anything you wear on your face longer than twenty minutes. You get a 70-degree field of view behind see-through lenses, cameras doing the hand tracking, and audio built on Bose-engineered technologies. Two sizes: medium at 60-66mm and large at 66-72mm.

The puck is the computer

None of the computing happens on your head. The glasses tether to a separate compute puck, and the puck is what runs Android XR, Google Play and Gemini. It has a trackpad built into it and a fingerprint sensor for unlocking.

That split is the whole trade. It gets you glasses under 95 grams instead of a visor, and it also puts a cable between your temple and your pocket. You get the lighter glasses, but you carry the brain separately.

Android XR is doing the heavy lifting

Aura ships with Google Play, which means it starts life with an app store rather than a handful of demos. Devices in this category usually fail because nothing runs on them, so that matters more than any line on the spec sheet. Gemini is built in. XREAL also kept the ability to plug the glasses into a computer and use them as an external monitor, which is a useful fallback on the days the native apps run out.

What XREAL still hasn't said

Shipping starts "soon" in the US, Canada, Japan and South Korea. XREAL hasn't named a day. A wider release is planned for 2027, with no word on which countries. General sale is "the coming weeks." For a product that now has a price and open preorders, that is a lot of blanks.

Engadget's writer tried the Aura at Google's developer conference and called the visuals "extremely sharp and bright," including outdoors in sunlight. That is one person's impression in a demo. XREAL hasn't made it an official claim. But sharpness and brightness in daylight are exactly what wearable displays tend to get wrong, so it counts for something.

Who should actually order one

If you already paid a deposit and you have wanted a pair since I/O, you now know the damage and you can go ahead. Everybody else is being asked to put flagship-phone money against glasses that need a tethered puck, with no ship date and no general-sale date.

The 70-degree field of view and the sub-95-gram build are a real step forward, and Google Play on your face is the part that could make this category stick. Wait for a ship date, and for somebody's second week with them.