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The best new tech heading your way

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SAMSUNG GALAXY XR

$1,799 (around £1,375), samsung.​com

The AR headset competition is well and truly hotting up. Meta's smart specs are grabbing headlines for right and wrong reasons, Apple has thrown the M5 chip into the Apple Vision Pro for a significant slickness upgrade, and now Samsung comes along with this very interesting headset based on the Android platform.

In our week playing around with it, the lighter hardware proved far more comfortable than Apple's option, making this wearable for much longer than some chunky headsets. The display proves plenty crisp, with strong (if not fantastic in low light) passthrough functionality. We must admit, though, that we didn't quite find it as seamless as the Vision Pro - the hand tracking works OK, but the eye tracking is pretty rough at this point, and needs frequent calibration. So why go Galaxy?

Well, Google's Gemini XR might just be the best Al assistant of its kind, finally justifying the Al-everything mentality by actually doing what you'd expect it to. There's native Netflix, it'll happily link to a PC rather than being tied to Mac, and it's a chunk cheaper too. So even though there are bugs to be ironed out - and we'd probably recommend holding off for a couple of software updates before jumping in - this is a fine competitor to the market leader. And it’s hard to argue that it isn’t a step in the right direction - if spending all day wearing computer goggles happens to be the right direction.

LIGHTEN THE LOAD

The headset itself weighs in at 545g, with an external 302g battery pack to tuck in your pocket. That's good for about two hours of use - behind the average three hours of the Vision Pro, but not insignificant when you consider the kind of things the Galaxy XR can do.

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