The Galaxy XR also comes with a ton of freebies
Samsung is launching the Galaxy XR today and it’s available to purchase.right now. It’s basically Samsung’s, Google’s, and Qualcomm’s answer to Apple’s Vision Pro, except it costs about half the price and comes with about a thousand dollars in freebies.
The product is powered by Android XR and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset, and frankly, it’s pretty neat. Samsung put me up in a hotel in New York City so I could try out the Galaxy XR, and the short story is that I was impressed, but still not sold on someone spending actual money on one of these things, even though the price plus incentives makes it way more compelling.
«With Galaxy XR, Samsung is introducing a brand-new ecosystem of mobile devices», said Won-Joon Choi, Chief Operating Officer of Mobile eXperience (MX) Business at Samsung Electronics. «Built on Android XR, Galaxy XR expands the vision for mobile AI into a new frontier of immersive and meaningful possibilities, allowing XR to move from concept to everyday reality, for both the industry and users.»
Some of the demos aren’t practical
Wouldn’t you just use your phone?
One of the first things Samsung showed at its event was finding good pizza nearby, using a new 3D, immersive maps experience and Gemini. It’ll have you saying things like, «This is really cool! Also, I’d never use it.»
That’s the reality of a feature like this. It makes for a fun demo, but no one is actually going to break out a headset to find out where the nearest good pizza spot is. You’re just going to search it on your phone, or ask Gemini on your phone.
Still, it’s a good way to show off the beautiful Google Maps experience, which is definitely something you can get lost in. When I did my demo, I got to properly try this out.
