There are two possible paths for augmented reality devices. One path is the all-in-one approach, which you might call the smartphone path or the Vision Pro Path: you buy a full-fledged single device with everything you need, and when you need an upgrade, you buy a new one. The other path is the unbundled one: your AR system might be lots of devices rather than just one, and you’ll upgrade and swap things in as you need them. That path is more like building a home theater system than buying a new iPhone.
The Xreal Beam Pro, which I’ve been testing for the last couple of weeks, is a big bet on unbundling. It’s a $199 Android device that looks and works like a smartphone but is intended to be used mostly as a companion to Xreal’s AR glasses. Xreal has found some success in the last few years building AR glasses that are essentially just big displays; you can plug in almost anything and see it projected in front of your face. With the Beam Pro, the company is trying to find a way to give you more and cooler AR stuff to do, without compromising the whole premise of its devices.
It’s like the glasses and the tablet are in an open relationship; they’re best together but still have plenty of value apart. But the Beam Pro itself just feels a bit underpowered and unfinished. There are too many bugs in its AR-specific features and too many times I really felt the sacrifices required to get this thing under $200. Xreal has the beginning of something really clever here, but I’ll probably wait for the next one.
The Beam Pro has two main jobs, as far as I can tell. The first is just to be a content machine for Xreal glasses, which it handles fairly well. Since it has access to the Play Store, you can download all the streaming apps, game streaming services, and whatever else you might want to see on the big virtual screen in your glasses. It has 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM, which is less than I’d like for something so geared toward photos, videos, and games. For an extra $50, you can get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and I recommend spending the money. But either way, unfortunately, the Beam Pro’s other specs keep it from working well enough to recommend.
As a pure app machine, the Beam Pro really only has two advantages over the phone already in your pocket. For one, it has a dual camera rig on the back that shoots 1080p 3D video and 50-megapixel 3D photos that you can play back in your glasses. The results are crisp and fun enough that I’ve used this camera much more than I expected. The Beam Pro also has a second USB-C port, so you can charge the device and plug it into your glasses simultaneously. I’m not sure how to weigh that convenience against the extra hassle of carrying and maintaining another device, but it is a nice touch.
Beyond that, it’s all software. The Beam Pro runs NebulaOS, which is Xreal’s twist on Android designed to work better on your face. When you plug the Beam Pro into a pair of glasses, you see apps mirrored like you’d expect, but Xreal has also added some extra UI: there’s an app launcher with a grid of icons that looks a lot like the Vision Pro and a control center that lets you quickly capture footage or change settings, and you can arrange apps in space in front of your face. It’s not as free-form as you’d get from Meta or Apple — you basically just stick a couple of apps next to each other — but it’s better than just mirroring your screen like most Android devices.
When you’re wearing the glasses, NebulaOS has an app that turns the Beam Pro into a remote control. There’s a little round cursor that you move by moving the device in space, and you tap on the screen to select something. To scroll, you just swipe on the Beam Pro’s screen. It’s a good idea and a great use of the device, but it doesn’t always work very well. Sometimes the screen registers a swipe as a tap, sometimes it registers a tap as a double-tap, and sometimes it seems to not be able to match the location of the cursor with the tap on the screen. In the Netflix app, for instance, I eventually figured out how to go back and forward — by double-tapping on the screen while pointing the cursor way off to the side — but I still can’t make it pause.Â
There are little bugs like this all over NebulaOS. The Beam Pro’s in-glasses display can be set to follow your head as you move or stay anchored in one space, which you select by tapping the orange Mode button on the right side of the device. But in the following mode, the screen often flickers and judders and lags behind my head; when I set it to stay in one spot, it consistently drifts downward over time. The Beam Pro just constantly feels like it’s trying to do too much.
Even the hardware feels a bit like an identity crisis. With a 6.5-inch screen, it’s a little big to use in one hand, so the remote gestures are kind of awkward. The Qualcomm chip inside just isn’t powerful enough to make the AR stuff feel smooth and crisp. Xreal’s in a tough spot here: if the Beam Pro is $800, nobody’s going to buy it, but it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to build a $200 Android device powerful enough to run real-time AR stuff.
It’s certainly possible that some of the software features can get better over time. I’ve already gotten a bunch of software updates on the Beam Pro, which have fixed or at least helped with some issues I’ve had. But Xreal’s track record here isn’t great: a lot of people who bought the original Beam, a much more minimalist remote control and content machine, are still complaining about the same serious bugs and missing features even months later. You should never buy a device based on promises of future improvements, but definitely don’t do it here.
Ultimately, I like the Beam Pro most as a fun and relatively inexpensive 3D camera. I don’t know whether spatial video is the future of anything, but I do enjoy watching my dog splash in the pool with some extra depth. (You can also play Beam Pro content back on the Vision Pro, which is neat.) When it comes to the AR features, though, I’m mostly opting out. I like Xreal’s idea about using your devices to power your glasses, but the Beam Pro just doesn’t have the power. I’ll stick with just mirroring my screen.
