Meta just fired the opening shot in the war to replace smartphones. At Meta Connect 2025, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the Ray-Ban Display smart glasses paired with a Neural Band that reads brain signals to let users text at 30 words per minute - nearly matching iPhone speeds without touching a screen. The $70 billion Reality Labs bet finally shows concrete results that could reshape how we communicate.
Mark Zuckerberg just declared war on the smartphone - and he's got the hardware to back it up. At Meta Connect 2025, the Meta CEO didn't just unveil another pair of smart glasses. He demonstrated a fundamental shift in how humans might interact with technology, one that could make pulling out your phone feel as antiquated as flipping open a Motorola Razr.
The star of Wednesday's show wasn't just the Ray-Ban Display glasses themselves, but the Meta Neural Band - a sleek wristband that reads the electrical signals your brain sends to your hand before you even move. Zuckerberg stood on stage at Meta's Menlo Park headquarters and silently typed out text messages at 30 words per minute, his fingers moving as if gripping an invisible pen while the glasses displayed his words in real-time.
"I'm up to about 30 words a minute on this," Zuckerberg told the audience, his casual delivery masking what might be the most significant input breakthrough since the touchscreen. "You can get pretty fast." To put that in perspective, research shows the average smartphone user texts at about 36 words per minute.
The technology behind this seeming magic trick is surface electromyography (sEMG), which detects the neural signals traveling from brain to hand during intended movements. According to Reality Labs' published research, users learn to "write" by holding their fingers as if gripping a pen and tracing out letters in the air. It's the culmination of Meta's four-year, multibillion-dollar investment in neural interface technology.
But Zuckerberg's pitch goes beyond the technical specs. "The promise of glasses is to preserve this sense of presence that you have with other people," he said during the keynote. "I think that we've lost it a little bit with phones, and we have the opportunity to get it back with glasses." It's a remarkable reframing from the CEO whose social media platforms arguably created our current attention crisis.
The timing couldn't be more strategic. Meta's Reality Labs has burned through $70 billion since 2020, raising investor concerns about when the division might deliver returns. Meanwhile, the existing Ray-Ban smart glasses have quietly sold , proving there's market appetite for subtle wearable computing.
