On Thursday, Snap Inc. started selling its much-awaited Spectacles for Snapchat, a pair of glasses that have a video camera in them. They pair with an app via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. They cost $129.99 and are available only on pop-up vending machines called Snapbots.
Snap Inc. teased the rollout of their Spectacles glasses for a long time, and their arrival came as a pleasant surprise. The Snapbot vending machines will be up at one location for just one day before moving to another place.
Snap Inc’s Spectacles come as a brilliant marketing move that could make the social media giant even greater. The Spectacles for Snapchat could ramp up the $25 billion valuations of the company if it ends up holding its IPO in Q1 2017 as previously reported.
What are Spectacles for Snapchat?
The new Spectacles for Snapchat are sleek-looking sunglasses equipped with a video camera for recording ten-second POV videos. The glasses come in three colors: Black, Teal, and Coral.
The Spectacles come with a dedicated button to start recording on the top of the left lens. They are always on, but not always recording. To start shooting a snap, users need to press and hold the button on the glasses for about two seconds.
How do I pair the Spectacles with my smartphone?
Pressing the Spectacles button again will extend the duration of the snap by ten seconds, and doing so one more time will add another ten seconds for a total of thirty.
Users will know the glasses are recording when the LED light ring on the front turns on and starts counting down.
To upload the snaps to Snapchat, users need to pair the Spectacles with the app on their smartphone. Once they are synchronized, every video the person records will go straight to Snapchat. The Spectacles connect to smartphones via BlueTooth or Wi-Fi.
Once uploaded, people can edit their videos before showing them off to friends and family. The glasses can record up to 100 snaps per charge. The Spectacles can charge with a cable like a smartphone or directly from the protective case.
Snapchat’s Spectacles price and where to get them?
Snap did not want to take a traditional approach to selling the Spectacles since the company does not know what the public’s general reaction will be yet. So, the marketing staff decided to sell the Spectacles in limited quantities and in a very original way.
A yellow, crazy-looking vending machine called a Snapbot will pop up at one location at a time in the United States every day for 24 hours or until the machine runs out of Spectacles. Each user can get up to two pairs of glasses.
Snapbots only accept debit and credit cards, and the first one appeared in front of Snap Inc’s headquarters in Venice Beach, California on Thursday morning. Snapchat fans can track where the next vending machine will pop up on the Spectacles official site.
Snapchat’s Spectacles cost $129.99, and nobody knows exactly how many the company will sell or for how long the Snapbots will keep popping up.
Source: Spectacles