Xreal’s new Beam Professional is an Android pill designed to work with augmented actuality glasses.

Xreal has made a reputation for itself due to some amazingly lovely augmented actuality glasseswho put in the show earlier than your eyes so you possibly can watch TV or play video games on an enormous display projected only for you. However in contrast to, say, Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional or Meta Quest 3Xreal doesn’t have any built-in software program or content material. It is only a display in your glasses. That is nice as a result of you possibly can join a variety of different units, but it surely limits what these glasses can do.

The brand new Beam Professional is Xreal’s newest try and bridge that hole. It is a moveable machine with roughly the scale of a smartphone, however Xreal sees it as extra of an addition to your glasses. It runs a personalized model of Android 14—Xreal calls it NebulaOS—and may be capable of load most apps onto the display of your face. And on the again is a dual-lens digital camera that can be utilized to seize spatial and 3D movies for viewing with glasses. (Or your Imaginative and prescient Professional; Xreal says Beam Professional footage will work in your Apple headset, too.)

The specs right here correspond to a pure smartphone: Beam Professional has a 6.5-inch display with a decision of 2400 x 1800 pixels, runs on Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (though it’s unclear which one), has 6 GB or 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB or 256 GB of inside reminiscence. The most affordable mannequin prices $199, though you in all probability will not want it until you shell out a couple of hundred {dollars} for a pair of Xreal glasses.

Nonetheless, there are a couple of apparent indicators that that is no extraordinary Android cellphone. First, there are twin 50-megapixel cameras, the likes of which we have not seen a lot on smartphones lately. The Beam Professional additionally has two USB-C ports, so you possibly can cost your machine and join it to your glasses on the identical time. Enhancements to NebulaOS for Android additionally concern augmented actuality; When you have got the glasses linked, you should use the Beam’s display as a touchpad, and the machine can be designed to open two apps aspect by aspect in your subject of view. Once you first join the glasses, the principle display of your apps seems, which you’ll be able to open and management utilizing the Beam Professional as a distant management.

Beam Professional seems to be like an enormous improve from Beam, which was basically only a distant management in your Xreal glasses. Ray undoubtedly solved an issue for Xreal homeowners, however there have been some issues: a gaggle of reviewers and customers discovered that it clumsy And unreliableand Xreal had issue explaining to customers why did it even exist. The display ought to make the Professional a lot simpler to make use of, and the digital camera ought to make it greater than only a smartphone substitute. You possibly can, after all, nonetheless join your Steam Deck or smartphone and use the Xreal glasses that method, but it surely seems like a extra built-in strategy.

Xreal’s strategy is basically much less extra built-in than what we see from Apple and Meta, each of that are decided to place a whole laptop in entrance of your face. However there’s one thing intelligent about Xreal’s strategy: it makes use of a very mature class of units to do all of the heavy lifting whereas inflicting as little bother to your face as attainable. At the least for now, this looks like an inexpensive technique.