I have to confess — I saw a very early prototype of this method at MWC 3 on May 2024. Even at this point, I'm confused about the Xreal Beam Pro.

At the At199, it's certainly at that price that might be worth a look at what you can do with it with your Xreal Air2 and Air2Ultra glasses. The smartphone UI will be very familiar to everyone to get into the spatial experience, and a second USB-C port or 3D content to charge while in use

But my inner skeptic has 1 question: Why is this not just an app?

Simply put, this is the connective tissue between your AR glasses, and the connective tissue between your face's glorious external monitor and spatial computing capabilities, and it's here to solve 5 key problems:

This is done through the familiar interface of the Snapdragon 400 series, a large 6.5-inch LCD touchscreen device with a discreet spatial companion processor.Android14 - a smartphone without a phone function. 

Additions that make this bespoke to extend the functionality of AR glasses are the dual 3D 50MP camera at the back for content capture, dual ports at the bottom for charging and staying in the space experience at the same time, and the highly vision professional-esque space UI built on NebulaOS.This can be done by hand if you use Beam Pro as a pointer or if you use Air2Ultra.

But the one thing I'm most keen to get for myself is Google Play support for Beam Pro. Whether it's downloading content to watch offline from Netflix or Prime Video, dabbling with tons of Android games, dabbling with Nvidia's GeForce Now and more, it opens up new avenues for opening and using millions of apps.

If there's one thing we've learned from the early excitement of Rabbit R1 1, it's to always ask if something is just an app. To be clear, I don't compare this directly to anything more than promised and under the delivery flop that was r1. But it's a question worth exploring, and I feel that Xreal also still understands.

When you push more than the average "Watch video on one screen while browsing the web on another screen" use case, although the Snapdragon chip is no problem, but will not set fire benchmark test and device specifications will appear on your average budget phone is also multitasking possible. You can quickly find the limit.

But most of you have a pretty powerful phone in your pocket (for me it's an iPhone15Pro), and the 3 39Xreal Hub directly addresses battery anxiety by charging your phone and letting you use your glasses.

In fact, that's the direction Viture adopted in the Pro XR specification, and you can use the Spacewalker app to use the power of your phone for this obvious purpose. Sure, I hate dongles as much as the next guy, but not enough to fill another pocket with another device.

I don't want to be in all doom and gloom here. With X199 (going down to down149 for verified buyers of the last generation Beam), Xreal is all to unlock spatial features in a well-priced piece of hardware

the implementation of Google services makes here a killer app and provides a lock on the ability to download content for offline use. By releasing Meta Quest3 more competitive than

But hopefully for those who want to use a more powerful and capable smartphone that they already have, Xreal will bring this Vision Pro-like space UI to the current Nebula app