Lenovo gets bold with Google Glass rival

Lenovo introduced their smart glass device on Thursday in an attempt to create an alliance of hardware and software makers to create a competitive smart glass device.

The device is similar looking to Google Glass but a bit more bulky and what looks like a battery that is external from the device and worn on the neck of the person. The device is still a very early pre-alpha prototype, but Lenovo wishes to create a mega alliance to invest and build a rangfe of smart devices together.

“Right now there are too many kinds of devices you can develop for the Internet of Things. It’s too rich. Not one company can do it all,” said Chen Xudong, Lenovo senior vice president. 

The NBD platform will offer funding, research, hardware manufacturing and more for their partners. The devices are aimed for China currently, but Lenovo hopes for international distribution in the future.

In addition to Lenovo’s own smart glasses prototype, the vendor is partnering with U.S. smart glasses maker Vuzix to bring its own product to China. The M100 smart glasses sports a dual-core 1 GHz processor and Android 4.0 and will first go on sale to developers for 8,000 yuan ($1298) in August or September, and is meant for business users. This headset is less expensive than Google Glass as of right now, but is also much less powerful and runs a pretty old version of Android.

via PCWorld