There are two possible paths for augmented reality devices. One path is the all-in-one approach, which you can call the smartphone path or the Vision Pro Path: buy a single device complete with everything you need, and when you need an upgrade, buy a new one. The other way is promiscuous: your AR system can be multiple devices rather than just one, and you’ll upgrade and change things as needed. This 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 two weeks, is a big bet for sharing. It’s a $199 Android device that looks and works like a smartphone, but is primarily intended to be used as a companion to Xreal’s AR glasses. Xreal has found some success in recent years building AR glasses that are basically just big screens; you can enter 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 things to do without compromising the whole premise of its devices.
It’s like the glasses and the tablet are in an open relationship; they are better together but still very far apart. But the Beam Pro itself just feels a little underpowered and unfinished. There’s a lot wrong with its AR-specific features, and many times I’ve really 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 another one.
The Beam Pro has two main jobs, as far as I can tell. The first is simply to be a content machine for the Xreal Glasses, which it handles quite well. Since it has access to the Play Store, you can download all the streaming apps, game streaming services and anything else you want to see on the big virtual screen on your glasses. It has 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM, which is less than I’d like for something so photo, video and gaming oriented. 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 performing well enough to be recommended.
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 on the back that shoots 1080p 3D video and 50-megapixel 3D photos that you can play back on your glasses. The results are so crisp and fun that I’ve been using this camera a lot more than I expected. The Beam Pro also has a second USB-C port, so you can charge the device and connect it to your glasses at the same time. I’m not sure how to weigh that convenience against the extra hassle of carrying and maintaining another device, but it’s a nice touch.
Beyond that, it’s all software. Beam Pro runs NebulaOS, which is Xreal’s twist on Android designed to work better on your face. When you attach the Beam Pro to a pair of glasses, you see mirrored apps as you’d expect, but Xreal has also added some extra interfaces: 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 change settings and you can arrange apps in the space in front of your face. It’s not as cheap as what you’d get from Meta or Apple – you basically just stick a few apps next to each other – but it’s better than just mirroring your screen like most Android devices.
When wearing glasses, NebulaOS has an app that turns the Beam Pro into a remote control. There is a small round cursor that you move around by moving the device in space and tap the screen to select something. To move, simply 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 can’t seem to match the cursor location to the touch on the screen. In the Netflix app, for example, I eventually figured out how to go back and forward — by double-tapping the screen while moving the cursor sideways — but I still can’t pause it.
There are little bugs like this all over NebulaOS. The Beam Pro’s goggle display can be set to follow your head as you move or stay anchored to a space, which you select by pressing the orange Mode button on the right side of the device. But in the following mode, the screen often flickers and flickers and lags behind my head; when you set it to stay in one place, it keeps going down 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 remote gestures are a bit awkward. The Qualcomm chip inside just isn’t powerful enough to make the AR stuff feel smooth and crisp. Xreal is in a tough spot here: if the Beam Pro costs $800, no one will buy it, but it’s somewhere between hard and impossible to build a $200 Android device powerful enough to run real-time AR stuff real.
It is of course possible that some of the features of the software may be improved over time. I’ve already received a bunch of software updates on the Beam Pro which have fixed or at least helped with some issues I’ve been having. But Xreal’s track record here isn’t great: many 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 months later. You should never buy a device based on promises of future improvements, but definitely don’t here.
Ultimately, I like the Beam Pro more as a fun and relatively inexpensive 3D camera. I don’t know if spatial video is the future of anything, but I like watching my dog splash in the pool with some extra depth. (You can also play Beam Pro content in Vision Pro, which is neat.) When it comes to AR features, though, I’m mostly picky. 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.