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VR and AR headsets

XReal Beam Pro

2owners with an opinion
–of verdicts positive
0/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and ease of use; criticized for portability.

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What people wrote

Neutral
My XReal Beam Pro¹ has two USB-C ports: one for charging, one for Thunderbolt video output (both support data transfer IIRC). My other phones (Samsung Galaxy A23 etc) have a USB-C and a 3.5mm headphone jack as Lord intended, so I don't have the idiotic problem of choosing between charging or using headphones / aux cable / etc. There's no reason to not have two USB-C ports and a 3.5mmm headphone jack too in a device that already costs hundreds of dollars and is, on average, brick-sized, other than fuck you, that's why (aka being "brave"). I.e., same reason that some phones (not mine) don't have a microSD card slot. Particularly those shipped with atrociously little internal memory at a time when a 1TB memory card costs a few dozen dollars. Anyways, unless the EU rolls out new legislation (like the one that forced Apple to include USB-C on their phones), looks like it's not going to change any time soon. Apple has enough money to bravely get away with whatever anti-consumer BS they want, paving the way for others to copy them for fashion and profit. Sure there are exceptions (which is what I buy). But they're not the norm , as evidenced by comments here. Voting with one's wallet buys very little in terms of impact. People still decry the loss of the 3.5mm TRRS headphone jack, which didn't really go away and never had to . ____ ¹ It's an "AR processor", i.e. an Android phone without the phone plus 3D camera and special sauce
Likes it
Ditto. I bought them because I travel a lot for work and TVs at hotels are always a mess when it comes to HDMI in. I use them on maybe 1 of 4 flights I’m on (usually on SteamDeck with XR plug-in in Decky), and rarely at the hotels. The only time they were really helpful for me was one flight when I had to work on some sensitive content and the person next to me was obviously trying to shoulder surf me. Maybe it would be more productive if I had a newer iPhone with USB -C or the XReal One glasses. But having to use all the dongles to get to go from iPhone to lightning/HDMI adapter to HDMI to USB-C cable to original XReal Beam (which is way underpowered), to USB-C to glasses, that’s a ton of cables. And some forget, you’ve now got to pair your AirPods with the Beam! Ughh. It’s a little better with the Beam Pro. It’s faster and generally a good experience, but it’s still another device and still doesn’t have a good way to stream 3D content from Plex/NAS. Ugh. That being said, when I put in the effort, the picture is very nice.