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Covering CES can change a person, and not necessarily for the better. Walking the show floor at the Las Vegas Convention Centre is an assault on the senses. Trying to remain serene while navigating the city on foot, by monorail, or in a cab could have been one of the Labours of Hercules, and $10 for a bottle of water puts London airports to shame. All of that is before you factor in the temptations at every turn in the City of Sin.
Having vacationed in Vegas several times but never having attended “the most powerful tech event in the world”, I travelled to CES 2026 as a one-man army on a tech mission. To see and absorb as much as possible and report back for the fine readers of Expert Reviews. Meet, greet, tweet, repeat. But I changed in a way I was definitely not expecting.
Having made it through 41 years without requiring any form of visual assistance, I now fancy myself as a glasses wearer. And that’s all down to the new XGIMI MemoMind smart glasses; the Chinese brand’s first move away from the world of projectors.
XGIMI was one of several manufacturers showcasing smart glasses at CES, but the MemoMind stood out as the most stylish, approachable and practical. There will be three pairs of glasses in the range: the flagship Memo One, the lightweight Memo Air Display, and a third model “designed to feel even closer to normal glasses”, which will be officially announced at a later date.
XGIMI Memo One: Beauty is in the AI of the beholder
I spent some time wearing and using the Memo One while in Vegas, and came away a convert. For starters, they look great, though I would say that they’re perhaps a little too bulky at the sides for my head – your mileage here will vary. They’ll also be available in three styles – I opted for the pair with rounded frames – and six colours. That’s an essential level of personalisation, given this is a product you’ll be wearing on your face all day.
However, smart glasses must deliver substance in addition to style. And, based on my experience with the Memo One, they do that in a user-friendly way. Both lenses house individual displays, while microphones and speakers are also integrated into the device. Of course, no product in 2026 would be complete without a healthy helping of AI, and the Memo One run a large language model operating system capable of selecting the right AI model for any given task. OpenAI, Azure and Qwen were all mentioned as models the glasses utilise to guide their handy features.
Among the features I got to try out were live Chinese-to-English translation, memos, a calendar dashboard, stocks and shares information, and the ability to record voice notes. There was even a karaoke-like feature that displayed lyrics to songs as they played through the glasses’ speaker. The green text on the displays was always easy to read, and navigating the interface’s menus via the single button near the hinge joining the right temple to the right lens proved extremely simple.
The sound quality when listening to music was reasonable, considering the physical limitations of the glasses-as-speakers format. High-fidelity sonic reproduction isn’t to be expected from a product such as this, but the delivery was clear and dynamic enough. I can’t comment on how things sound on calls, as I didn’t have the chance to test this, but it will be a decisive factor in how appealing the Memo One are for business users.
Preorders for the Memo One are said to “open soon”, with the glasses set to cost around $599, which translates to roughly £450.
XGIMI Memo Air Display: Lightweight and minimalistic
If that’s a bit dear, you’ll want to keep an eye out for the Memo Air Display. Although XGIMI hasn’t confirmed a price for the Air Display, I expect them to be a fair bit cheaper as they use a single-eye display and provide a more streamlined suite of features and information.
Additionally, their design is one intended to be more minimalistic and representative of wearing traditional glasses. At under 29g, they’re certainly very light, though XGIMI has managed to find room for a battery that should last you a whole day of use. Meanwhile, the case that they come with is said to extend their battery life to a full week.
Despite focusing on its inaugural smart wearables, XGIMI didn’t neglect the product category that it’s known for: projectors. As well as showing off some of the portable projectors that arrived in 2025, it revealed a new model due to be released in the next few months, the XGIMI Titan Noir Max.
XGIMI Titan Noir Max: XGIMI’s “most cinematic and accessible pro projector yet”
We reviewed a trio of XGIMI projectors in 2025, with the XGIMI MoGo 4 Laser and XGIMI Horizon S Pro both picking up our Best Buy award in their respective categories. One we didn’t get the chance to look at was the XGIMI Titan, a beast of a 4K projector primarily designed for professional, rather than home cinema enthusiast, use.
The Titan Noir Max is the successor to that model, and XGIMI says that its latest beamer delivers “the best picture XGIMI has ever engineered” while marking the moment when “professional-grade projection becomes personal.”
Native contrast is stated at an incredible 10,000:1, while a dual-iris system is employed to deliver deeper blacks and more brilliant highlights, though XGIMI hasn’t put a figure on the projector’s luminance at this stage. Still, I got a little glimpse at what it’s capable of, and was rather impressed. In a very bright room, I was still able to make out the picture easily, and not just the brighter areas of images; there was decent definition in darker sections, too.
Certification for HDR10+, Dolby Vision and IMAX Enhanced means the Noir Max is fantastically well-covered for home cinema viewing, while a wider zoom and lens-shift range compared to 2025’s Titan give users more flexibility as to where they position the projector.
On the aesthetic front, the Titan Noir Max looks like something you might see combing the surface of Mars, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. The four rods that it sits on give it a rover-like appearance, but one that’s sleek enough to fit into most modern living rooms. And the Noir Max is well-equipped where connectivity is concerned, too, with an HDMI eARC input, two further HDMI inputs, USB-A and optical ports, an audio jack, and an Ethernet socket.
XGIMI is keeping tight-lipped on pricing for the Noir Max, but I’d be very surprised to see it selling for less than £3,000. We can expect more information on an exact release date and price soon, however, as the projector is going to be available for preorder in Q1 this year.
