Samsung Galaxy XR Review: Needs More Polish

Sharp, colorful micro-OLED displays. Access to Android apps. Lightweight.

Not really comfortable. Quite a few bugs. Navigation is not super precise. My “Likeness” looks like I’m on drugs.

I have had the new M5-powered Apple Vision Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR headsets sitting on my desk for several weeks. These are expensive, cutting-edge pieces of hardware. Apple's version is $3,499! Samsung's headset is roughly half that—still a pretty penny at $1,800. Mustering the energy to don them has been a task.

You can watch movies, play immersive games, and get some work done with multiple virtual screens. None of these experiences has been so compelling that I want to wear a headset on my face for more than an hour. Still, I gave it the ol' college try, and my takeaway is that Google and Samsung have more work ahead of them to improve the Android XR experience; I've also had a strange and newfound appreciation for the quality of Apple's mixed reality headset.

Finding Comfort

I purchased the Galaxy XR from Samsung's website, and the company offers a handy link to EyeBuyDirect, where you can buy prescription Kodak magnetic inserts for $100 so you can use the headset without glasses. The process was seamless, though long shipping times meant my inserts arrived weeks before the XR.

While I appreciate how much more lightweight the Galaxy XR is compared to the Vision Pro, I constantly struggled to find a comfortable fit. You put the headset on and turn a knob at the back to tighten the band around your head, but there's often a good amount of pressure resting on your forehead, which also gets warm when the audible fans kick in; it's near impossible not to have a sweaty brow after a bout in XR. Two magnetic light shields in the box do a decent job of blocking ambient light from filtering into your virtual reality, but they're not perfect, as I still encountered some slight light bleed.

The Galaxy XR routinely told me to shift the headset up or down whenever I popped it on my head, and while I occasionally could find a fit that worked for a spell, I wouldn't call it comfortable. The included forehead cushion helps a bit, but I wouldn't have minded softer padding. Surprisingly, I found Apple's Vision Pro with the new Dual Knit Band immensely more supportive. Because there are two points where you can customize the fit, it rests much better on the head.

The visual quality of Samsung's 4K micro-OLED display is excellent and one of the highlights of the Galaxy XR. Everything generally looks sharp. I enjoyed watching a few episodes of Stranger Things season 5 on the headset, and I spent a fair amount of time playing Grimvalor with a paired PlayStation 5 DualSense controller.

Overall, the gesture-based navigation and eye tracking are fine, though not quite as precise as Apple's system in the Vision Pro. Sometimes the iris unlock wouldn't work, forcing me to input my PIN to unlock the headset. I'd often have trouble getting the eye tracking to land on exactly the right virtual button, so I'd have to resort to the pointer-style finger gesture to make selections. (And yes, I did try recalibrating the eye tracking.)

Where the Vision Pro can pick up on minute changes I make with my fingers, I found myself needing to be more pronounced with my gestures on the Galaxy XR. Sometimes I'd have to make sure my fingers were facing the headset for selections to work, but I never had to do that with the Vision Pro. On the Galaxy XR, there were far more occasions where my virtual screens just moved around because it thought I was making a pinch gesture. Even looking at my hand and pinching—how you evoke the home button—sometimes took multiple pinches to activate. The whole thing is rough around the edges.

That's without mentioning the other bugs. When I tried to work in Chrome and opened more than six tabs, Chrome stopped working and required a restart. My Telegram app did the same here and there, and so did Google Play Services when I tried to run Grimvalor once. I also had a problem with a paired mouse when I tried to get some virtual work done—the cursor kept disappearing, only appearing after a few seconds of shaking my mouse violently. It made it really difficult to work in the headset.

Initially, I couldn't pair the Galaxy XR to my PC because this feature requires a Samsung Galaxy Book laptop, but Google recently issued an update that introduced a beta app called PC Connect for Android XR. Download it on your Windows PC (Mac support is coming later), and it instantly brings your Windows desktop screen into the XR's space, and you can keep using your keyboard and mouse that are paired with your desktop. This was excellent and a much nicer way to work, rather than trying to recreate my workspace with Android apps, but I still had the issue with the mouse cursor periodically disappearing, so I was never able to really get much work done. It's not as seamless a system as Apple's Mac Virtual Display.

I did try Game Link, which requires you to download Samsung's Game Link app on the Microsoft Store on your PC, along with Steam and SteamVR. The idea is you'll be able to stream your Steam games, VR or otherwise, to the headset. Unfortunately, while I could briefly connect the Galaxy XR to the Game Link app, SteamVR consistently failed, and the entire prompt on the headset to connect controllers and continue the pairing process would disappear. There could be various things causing the issue, so it's hard to say if this is a Galaxy XR problem or something else. (It's worth noting that there are other ways to connect the Galaxy XR to your PC via third-party apps, but I didn't try them.)

Android XR

What's nice about Android XR is that Samsung and Google aren't starting from scratch in terms of the app ecosystem. You can pretty much access any Android app and bring it into your virtual space, though some apps are better designed for this experience than others. (The Slack app still sucks on anything larger than a phone screen.)

A key feature of Android XR is the ability to chat with Google's Gemini chatbot willy-nilly. I did this a few times when I wanted to figure out how to connect the PS5 controller to the headset, and it pulled up YouTube video recommendations so I could watch a how-to. But bizarrely, Gemini repeatedly said things I don't think I'm meant to hear. When I looked at the chat transcript, it became clear that Gemini sometimes responded to my queries with its instructions on how to parse a command. “<\ctrl94> The user wants to open the Telegram app. I need to check if Telegram is installed on the device first. <\ctrl95>." This happened multiple times when I invoked Gemini to ask a question. Remember, this isn't some prototype hardware device Samsung sent me; this is the consumer version I purchased myself.

I still don't know how often I would realistically chat with Gemini, even if the experience was more polished. In the same vein, I spent about two minutes looking at spatialized versions of my photos in the Google Photos app, said “neat,” and never cared to use the feature again. It's just not that interesting.

Don't get me started on my avatar. I customized a cartoonish Galaxy avatar to replicate my likeness; they look like Bitmoji (aka not great), and the avatar does a poor job of re-creating facial expressions. Minutes into my Zoom meeting with a coworker, he complained that it was hard to figure out what my face was trying to do and that he also couldn't hear me very well because the headset's mic kept cutting off.

Thankfully, Google came to the rescue with a recent update that added “Likeness,” designed to be a more realistic representation of yourself, like Apple's Personas. You have to download Google's Likeness app on your phone first and scan your face, then it'll send it to your Galaxy XR. It immediately looked more like me, but my eyes were weirdly wide, and anytime I made a mouth movement, it would show my full set of teeth. I video-called my wife via Google Meet, and she just said no, screenshotted my face, and posted it on her Instagram Story for all our friends to laugh at. I looked like I was on drugs.

The Galaxy XR is a niche product. I really like playing around with the latest and greatest tech, and I enjoy working spatially with the right hardware. I've had loads of fun in devices like the Meta Quest headset, playing games like SuperHot and Beat Saber. But headsets like the Galaxy XR and Vision Pro are simply too bulky, heavy, and annoying to wear for more than an hour. Putting them on feels like a chore, and I don't think they offer that much greater an experience than I can have in my non-virtual world. Heck, I don't even mind the tethered battery. If these can get drastically lighter, comfier, and smaller, I could see a world where I'd pop ’em on for a few hours and enjoy a virtual reality to get away from life. Unfortunately, we’re still not there.