MENLO PARK, September 24 — Meta has launched a new AI-powered wearable called Charm, a device the company is positioning inside a wider industry scramble to build hardware that comes after the smartphone. The Japan Times reported the debut, describing it as an escalation of competition in AI gadgets. Charm is an AI gadget in the plain sense: its core functions are driven by artificial intelligence rather than by a conventional smartphone operating system.
That definition is doing a lot of work. The smartphone has been the dominant personal computing platform since Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, and the industry has spent years hunting for whatever replaces it.
Smartwatches, smart glasses, wireless earbuds and AI pins have all been tried as candidate form factors. None has yet displaced the phone.
What Meta brings to the race
Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. It has invested heavily in AI research and in mixed-reality hardware through its Reality Labs division. Its existing hardware lineup gives it a running start.
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses were developed in partnership with the eyewear maker EssilorLuxottica, and the Quest line of virtual-reality headsets has been on the market for years. Meta has also integrated AI features across its apps and hardware, and has signalled that AI assistants and wearable devices sit at the centre of its long-term strategy.
Charm places Meta in direct competition with other technology companies pursuing AI-native devices, including wearable pins, smart glasses and screenless assistants.
What we still don’t know
The Japan Times report does not specify Charm’s price, release date, technical specifications, availability by country, or the names of executives involved in the launch. It gives no sales projections and no market-share figures. Meta has not publicly disclosed unit sales for its existing hardware products.
The company reports Reality Labs revenue within its quarterly earnings, which is the closest outside observers get to a view of how the hardware business is performing. Analysts have debated whether AI wearables will achieve mass adoption at all.
The obstacles cited are practical rather than exotic: battery life, privacy concerns, social acceptability, and the sheer difficulty of getting people to put down a device they already know how to use. Meta’s move follows other AI hardware launches that have met with mixed commercial results. The report does not name specific competing products or their sales figures.
What to watch next is whether Meta fills in the blanks it has so far left open — price, ship date, and which markets get Charm first. Until then, the launch is a statement of intent more than a product story.
