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 fully-fledged single device with everything you need, and when you need to upgrade, you buy a new one. The other path is the unbundled one: Your AR system can consist of many devices instead of just one, and you upgrade and swap things out 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 past few weeks, is a big bet on unbundling. It’s a $199 Android device that looks and acts like a smartphone, but is primarily intended to be used as a companion to Xreal’s AR glasses. Xreal has had some success in recent years building AR glasses that are essentially big displays; you can plug in almost anything and see it projected in front of your face. With the Beam Pro, the company is attempting to find a way to give you more, and cooler, AR stuff to do without compromising the entire premise of its devices.
It’s like the glasses and the tablet have an open relationship; they’re best together, but they also have a lot of value on their own. But the Beam Pro itself just feels underpowered and unfinished. There are too many bugs in the AR-specific features, and too often I felt the sacrifices needed to get this thing under $200. Xreal has the start of something really smart 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 simply being a content engine for the Xreal glasses, which it does fairly well. Since it has access to the Play Store, you can download all the streaming apps, game streaming services, and whatever else you want to watch 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 focused on photos, video, and games. For an extra $50, you can get 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, and I’d recommend spending that money. Either way, unfortunately, the Beam Pro’s other specs hold it back enough to recommend it.
As a pure app machine, the Beam Pro really only has two advantages over the phone you’re already carrying in your pocket. First, it has a dual-camera setup on the back that shoots 1080p 3D video and 50-megapixel 3D photos that you can play back through your glasses. The results are sharp and fun enough that I found myself using this camera far more often 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 at the same time. I’m not sure how to weigh that convenience against the added hassle of carrying and maintaining another device, but it’s a nice addition.
Beyond that, it’s all software. The Beam Pro runs NebulaOS, which is Xreal’s take on Android designed to work better on your face. When you stick the Beam Pro into a pair of glasses, you’ll see mirrored apps as you’d expect, but Xreal has added some additional UI as well: 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 images or tweak settings, and you can arrange apps in the space in front of your face. It’s not as freeform as you’d get from Meta or Apple – you basically just stick a bunch of apps side by side – but it’s better than simply 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 small circular cursor that you move by moving the device around in space, and you tap the screen to select something. To scroll, you just swipe across the Beam Pro’s screen. It’s a neat idea, and a great way to use the device, but it doesn’t always work well. Sometimes the screen registers a swipe as a tap, sometimes it registers a tap as a double-tap, and sometimes it can’t seem to match the location of the cursor with the tap on the screen. In the Netflix app, for example, I eventually figured out how to go back and forward — by double-tapping the screen with the cursor pointed all the way to the side — but I still can’t pause it.
There are little bugs like this all over NebulaOS. The Beam Pro’s in-glass display can be set to follow your head as you move or to stay in one spot, which you select by tapping the orange Mode button on the right side of the device. But in the latter mode, the screen often flickers and jerks and lags behind my head; if 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 like it’s got a bit of an identity crisis. With a 6.5-inch display, it’s a bit large to use one-handed, so remote gestures are a bit fiddly. The Qualcomm chip inside just isn’t powerful enough to make the AR stuff feel smooth and crisp. Xreal is in a bit of a pickle here: if the Beam Pro costs $800, no one is going to buy it, but it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to build a $200 Android device powerful enough to do real-time AR stuff.
It’s certainly possible that some software features will improve over time. I’ve gotten a couple of software updates on the Beam Pro already, which have fixed or at least helped with some of the issues I was having. But Xreal’s track record here isn’t great: Plenty of people who bought the original Beam, a much more minimalist remote and content engine, 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 don’t do it here.
Ultimately, I like the Beam Pro best as a fun, relatively inexpensive 3D camera. I’m not sure spatial video is the future, but I do like the idea of watching my dog splash in the pool with a little added depth. (You can also play Beam Pro content on the Vision Pro, which is cool.) When it comes to the AR features, though, I mostly opt to bow out. I like Xreal’s idea of using your devices to power your glasses, but the Beam Pro just doesn’t have the power. I’ll just stick with mirroring my screen.