If you want to buy a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses, you may be in for a long wait, especially if you live outside the US.

Meta said in a blog post Tuesday that a combination of strong demand and «extremely limited inventory» of the new augmented reality glasses, introduced in September, has caused it to pause a planned early 2026 expansion to the UK, France, Italy and Canada. It noted that current product waitlists now extend deep into this year. 

«We’ll continue to focus on fulfilling orders in the US while we re-evaluate our approach to international availability,» a company spokesperson wrote in the post, which also detailed news items related to CES 2026.   

Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

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Smart glasses are having a boom moment as 2026 gets underway, with technology companies investing heavily in eyewear as a home for cameras, displays, microphones and no small amount of AI features. Google and Xreal, for instance, just introduced their Project Aura glasses, coming this year, and it’s widely expected that Apple will join the fray in the coming months.

Meta became the standard-bearer for the field with its earlier Ray-Ban designs, and is hoping to build on that momentum with the Ray-Ban Display model, distinguished by the miniature display in one lens and a wrist-worn neural band that serves as a controller.

In his review of the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, priced at $800, CNET’s Scott Stein called them an impressive new technology even as he expressed some misgivings. «These Display glasses are like prototypes, but the landscape is changing fast, and Meta will need to perfect the next generation further.»

Ramon Llamas, research director for mobile devices at IDC, said that Tuesday’s announcement should be seen as a delay, rather than something more dire, and that the strong early response for the Display should be encouraging to Meta. 

Because the Display Ray-Bans are a first-generation device, Meta likely kept the volumes relatively low, Llamas said. «Better to limit the supply and address any bugs and adjustments before mass producing them.»

Technology analyst Daniel Burrus echoed that sentiment, noting the many factors — disparate certifications, privacy rules and regulations, language barriers and retail servicing — that Meta must consider for international orders. «Meta’s pause on international orders doesn’t feel like a stumble, rather a ‘let’s not scale too fast’ decision,» he said.

New Ray-Ban Display features announced at CES 

Meta also revealed a few new features that are coming for the Display glasses, including a teleprompter and finger-writing.

The Display’s teleprompter feature, coming sometime this week, allows wearers to give a speech or a presentation while a «discreet teleprompter» with customizable text-based cards scrolls in their field of vision at whatever speed they choose. 

The finger-writing feature, called EMG handwriting, is available for early access today. Using the Display glasses with the neural band on the wrist, you can write with your finger on any surface. The Neural Band will turn the writing into a digital message that you can send via WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. 

You can sign up for early access to new Display features here.

While some of the world’s biggest tech companies including Meta, Google and (reportedly) Apple are eyeing the future of smart glasses, startups are working on a major innovation for the other kind of glasses. The regular kind, worn by billions across the world. 

One of those startups, Finland-based IXI Eyewear, has raised more than $40 million from investors including Amazon to build glasses with adaptive lenses that could dynamically autofocus based on where the person wearing them is looking.

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In late 2025, the company said it had developed a glasses prototype that weighs just 22 grams. It includes embedded sensors aimed at the wearer’s eyes and liquid crystal lenses that respond accordingly. According to the company, the autofocus is «powered by technology hidden within the frame that tracks eye movements and adjusts focus instantly — whether you’re looking near or far.»

By contrast, smart glasses like Meta’s Ray-Bans and Ray-Bay Displays as well as Xreal and Google’s Project Aura are leaning into cameras that look out at the world around the user and AI-powered features such as facial recognition, language translation and recording photos and video. Lenses tend to be a secondary consideration.

IXI told CNN in a story published Tuesday that it’s expecting to launch its glasses within the next year. It has a waitlist for the glasses on its website but has not said in what regions they’ll be available.

While the goal is to make these glasses an improvement on traditional bifocals and progressive lenses, the IXI glasses likely won’t be a fully seamless experience. «The center part is the sharp area, and then there is the edge where the liquid crystal stops and which is not that great to look into, but the center area is large enough that you can use that for reading,» CEO Niko Eiden told CNN. «So, we do have our own distortions that we’re introducing, but the majority of the time, they will not be visible.»

The IXI glasses won’t be cheap. «We will be in the really high end of existing eyewear,» Eiden said.  

IXI didn’t immediately respond to CNET’s request for additional comment.

This type of technology is also being pursued by Japanese startups Elcyo and Vixion, which already has a product with adaptive lenses embedded in the middle of the lenses (they do not look like standard glasses).

It’s one thing to have a great idea and another to actually make it a reality. The newly announced Clicks Communicator phone, from the keyboard phone case company of the same name, is a refreshing breath of fresh air that is also oh-so-familiar. You might easily mistake it for a BlackBerry phone from circa 2007, and that’s because it was designed by a former BlackBerry designer. However, it runs Android 16 and has a nifty, minimalist app launcher that looks sleek and contemporary. In the hour I spent learning about it and using a non-working prototype, the Clicks Communicator quickly became my favorite CES gadget in years.

The Communicator is a surprisingly smart take that combines old and new phone features in a way that, aside from Motorola, very few phone makers have successfully done before. It’s a straightforward-to-use Android smartphone with seemingly every popular feature that companies have removed over the past decade.

In its small design, there is a physical keyboard, a notification alert light, a headphone jack, a physical SIM card tray, support for a microSD card and buttons, oh so many buttons. Jony Ive’s soul must be hurting right now.

At a time when phones have become overly complicated, AI-centric attention stealers, the Clicks Communicator aims to provide an experience optimized for typing and voice-to-text recording, all while minimizing distractions. It’s designed to be a secondary device that complements your regular smartphone. The idea is similar to what Palm tried almost a decade ago, when it sold a small Android phone meant to complement larger ones. However, Palm’s phone didn’t offer amenities like a physical keyboard.

«Communicator is to a smartphone what a Kindle is to an iPad,» said Jeff Gadway, chief marketing officer at Clicks, in a press release. «It’s a complementary product that stands on its own, optimized for a specific purpose. In the case of Clicks Communicator, that means communicating with confidence in a noisy world.»

We expect our smartphones to do anything we want, but that often means compromising on how features are implemented. On an iPhone 17 Pro, for example, I can definitely type and respond to texts, emails and jot down the occasional random thought in the Notes app. But for me, and I expect many others, I have a much more enjoyable experience typing on a physical keyboard. I prefer to use a laptop to respond to a long or complex email versus writing it on a phone.

But the Communicator’s singular focus on input, along with the fact that it can be your only phone, unlocks a much wider appeal (at least on paper). I could see the Communicator being the ideal «work» phone for those jobs where you want a separate device from your personal smartphone. You could quickly respond to a Slack thread without being tempted to check out TikTok or Instagram.

It might be an attractive option to a growing number of people who crave a phone that doesn’t need all their attention every damn minute. This could be someone burnt out from being obsessively online or someone who misses having a physical keyboard and features like a headphone jack. It could appeal to a person who wants a minimal-feeling smartphone like the Light Phone and Punkt, which each have their own take on what a less distracting phone might look like.

The Communicator costs $499 and launches later this year. However, you can preorder the phone for $399 or reserve one for $199 right now. It joins the Clicks Keyboard Pro and Keyboard Case.

«We’re really trying to help have people see us as a company that’s building purpose-built tech for people who want to do shit and not doom scroll,» Gadway told me.

Clicks Communicator’s stand-out features

Name: The phone is named in part for the iconic handheld voice device from Star Trek. Clicks co-founder Michael Fisher also explained that calling the device a «communicator» really captures what the phone was designed for: to provide the best typing and voice-to-text experience (in terms of both hardware and software) that you’ll find on a phone.

Design: The phone is compact. Its aluminum frame and polycarbonate body felt solid in my hand. Small phone lovers, this one seems aimed at you. It weighs only 170 grams. Compare that to the iPhone 17 Pro, which is 206 grams. It’s roughly the size of a small SSD or magnetic battery pack. It has a 4-inch screen and a keyboard similar to the one found on the Clicks keyboard case — with keys that are 43% larger on the Communicator.

Android 16 and Niagara launcher: The Communicator runs on Android 16 and has a custom version of the Niagara app launcher. Messages from apps like WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack are curated directly on the home screen, allowing people to review and respond quickly without having to open and jump between apps.

Prompt Key and Signal light: On the right side of the phone is a button called the Prompt Key. You press and hold it to record voice-to-text. Surrounding the button is the Signal light (think Android notification light from years ago) that makes it easy to distinguish messages and notifications at a glance. It can be customized with different colors and light patterns to glow when getting messages from specific people, groups, or apps.

Removable backplate: The back has a sloped, ergonomic, and interchangeable plate — think Moto X. During my briefing, there were half a dozen different plates made of polycarbonate and leather. The backplate also supports Qi2.2 wireless charging.

Other features:

• 50-megapixel rear camera with optical image stabilization
• 24-megapixel front camera
• 4,000 mAh silicon-carbon battery
• 256GB onboard storage plus expandable microSD
• Physical SIM card tray and eSIM
• A 3.5mm headphone jack
• Android 16 with 5 years of security updates
• Global 5G, 4G LTE, and 3G/2G support, unlocked
• NFC with Google Pay, Bluetooth 5.4, Wi-Fi 6
• USB-C and wireless charging
• 4,000mAh battery
• A 3.5mm headphone jack
• A configurable mute switch