The Xreal Beam Pro has good ideas about AR — but not enough juice
Image: Xreal
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...