A Meta smartwatch may be closer than it appears, and the clues are hiding inside the company’s newest device. At Meta’s Connect conference in late September, Mark Zuckerberg held up a pendant and announced the Muse Charm, a small, novelty-style gadget featuring Meta’s Muse AI agent. The Muse Charm is due to arrive as soon as December this year.
While many observers described the device as an “AI Tamagotchi”, its form factor also resembles a strapless smartwatch. That raises an obvious question: could the Muse Charm eventually evolve into a wrist wearable as well as a pendant? The timing is notable, given that smartwatches are increasingly being positioned as AI assistants in their own right.
Speculation about Meta developing its own watch has circulated for several years. At Connect, the focus was firmly on smart glasses and a new glasses-like VR headset due next year, while wrist wearables went largely unmentioned.
The Neural Band and the EMG Connection
Meta already offers one wrist wearable: the neural band supplied with the Ray-Ban Display glasses. It received no hardware updates this year. The sensor-packed band uses electromyography, or EMG, to measure skin-contact electrical signals for a set of gesture controls that navigate the heads-up display. Meta has suggested EMG could unlock a wide range of neural input possibilities, including a smart car dashboard prototype.
Last year, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth indicated that a display or watch-like evolution of the neural band could be in development. Meta also introduced a partnership with Garmin, linking fitness tracking to its smart glasses.
The Muse Charm adds a further piece to the puzzle. Muse AI is now Meta’s clear priority, with broad availability on desktops and smartphones, and plans to bring the agentic AI to all its smart glasses and, eventually, its VR Glasses.
Why the Hardware Points to a Watch
The Charm offers another watch-like tell. It is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite chipset, which already runs Samsung’s latest smartwatches. The Wear Elite is optimised for a range of AI-ready wearables, from watches to pendants and even glasses. There is no technical reason the Charm could not be fitted with a wrist strap and a suitable watch operating system.
A smartwatch would benefit Meta on several fronts. The company clearly wants to expand into lifestyle wearables, and a watch would provide another route to users beyond the face. Fitness and health tracking would supply data that Muse and the smart glasses could draw on. Watches are also becoming central to the future of the glasses interface: Google’s glasses are set to work with Wear OS watches, and Apple’s rumoured glasses are expected to pair with the Apple Watch.
Meta still faces the challenge of making its neural band more wearable, as the current first-generation band remains a work in progress. The Muse Charm is scheduled to launch as soon as December 2026.
