XReal Beam Pro

I’ve become fond of using smart glasses like the XReal Air 2 ($399) that function as a wearable display for my phone or computer. They typically show your connected device as a screen locked right in front of your eyes, a useful feature, though not exactly true augmented reality. You can’t even access that locked-screen experience if you have a Google Pixel or a Samsung Galaxy smartphone, since smart video glasses typically require USB-C connections that support DisplayPort. XReal has an answer to both dilemmas with its Beam Pro, a $199 Android-based AR hub that works like a smartphone, has its own interface that supports head tracking, and can even shoot 3D photos and videos. Its best features are limited to XReal smart glasses, but if you own a pair, the Beam Pro is a fun and useful accessory with a bit more power than smartphones in its price range.

Design: Looks Like a Phone, Isn't a Phone

The Beam Pro looks and feels like a typical budget-to-midrange smartphone, but it's not one. This $200 device is designed for streaming and handling the connected smart glasses’ XR features, and that’s it.

Measuring 6.4 by 2.9 by 0.4 inches (HWD), the Beam Pro is a bit big. If you have smaller hands, you might need to use both of them for navigation, but it doesn't feel clunky or unwieldy. It has rounded corners like many smartphones, but its chassis is white plastic, so it doesn’t give the premium look and feel you get from the aluminum of an iPhone or the glass of a Galaxy or Pixel. Considering its price, that’s not surprising.

The 6.5-inch, 2,400-by-1,080 LCD takes up the entire face of the Beam Pro, with the exception of a black border that’s slightly wider than the one around the iPhone 15’s screen. A cutout near the top holds the 8MP selfie camera.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Power and multipurpose buttons sit on the right edge of the Beam Pro, and a pop-out tray for a microSD card (not included) is on the opposite edge. The bottom of the Beam Pro features two USB-C ports, one for power and one for connecting to smart glasses.

The back of the Beam Pro holds its most interesting aspect. Two camera lenses sit on the left side, spaced fairly far apart. These are 50MP f/2.2 cameras with pixel binning to shoot 12MP images or up to 1080p60 or 4K30 videos. More important, the Beam Pro can shoot spatial photos and videos like the iPhone 15 Pro. These are 3D images stored in a standard side-by-side format so any stereoscopic display, whether smart glasses or a VR headset, should be able to show them.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Be ready to enter your PIN repeatedly, because the Beam Pro skimps on authentication. It has no fingerprint sensor, and the selfie camera doesn’t support facial ID, so you’ll be tapping in a number every time you want to unlock it.

Features & Components: Peppy Performance for the Price

The Beam Pro uses an unspecified Qualcomm Snapdragon spatial companion processor that seems comparable with the Snapdragon 600 series SoC in terms of power. The base 128GB version has 6GB of RAM, while the 256GB version ($249) has 8GB of RAM.

It runs on Android 14 with an AR layer XReal calls NebulaOS built on top of it. NebulaOS is designed specifically for XReal smart glasses and comes integrated directly into the Beam Pro’s operating system. The NebulaOS interface will open up on your smart glasses when you plug them in, but only if they’re made by XReal. The Beam Pro will output video to any other smart glasses through the USB-C port, but NebulaOS will be inaccessible. Keep that in mind if you already have RayNeo, Rokid, or Viture glasses, because you won’t get any of the AR features the Beam Pro offers.

Using the Beam Pro alone feels like using any midrange stock Android handset. It doesn’t have any phone features, but it has Wi-Fi 6, full access to the Google Play store, and an unencumbered interface with three default widgets on the home screen (smart glasses status, camera, and storage status). None of them is necessary, but you can remove or rearrange them as easily as any other Android widget. The NebulaOS features for the smart glasses are kept underneath the screen’s interface, and they aren’t disruptive or even visible when your glasses aren’t connected.

(Credit: Primate Labs/PCMag)

We tested the Beam Pro like we test phones, and it got a single-core score of 922 and a multi-core score of 2,644 in Geekbench 6, outperforming the $199.99 Samsung Galaxy A15 (704 single, 1,855 multi). It also had a higher multi-core number, surprisingly, than the $299.99 Galaxy A25 (2,058), but slightly lower for single-core (964). Of course, both of those Galaxy handsets are phones, and adding cellular circuitry can significantly increase the price of a device, so it makes sense that the A15 would have a bit less power than the identically priced Beam Pro.

XReal doesn't give an estimate for the Beam Pro's battery life, but it lasted at least six to eight hours on a charge in our tests. It's designed to be used with AR smart glasses, though, and it has two USB-C ports so it can stay charged while powering those glasses, so our normal mobile device battery tests don't really apply to this product.

NebulaOS: The XReal-Only AR Experience

Plug a pair of XReal smart glasses into the Beam Pro, and everything changes. Instead of a mirrored screen, the NebulaOS AR interface loads on the glasses, and the screen turns into a large touchpad with Home, Anti-mistouch, Capture, Record, and Scan buttons. The Home button opens an apps list of icons arranged in a cluster, like the visionOS home screen of the Apple Vision Pro ($3,499).

The XReal Air 2 Pro we tested the Beam Pro with doesn't have cameras, so captures from the device show only what is projected on the transparent lenses against a black background. The below image offers a look at the NebulaOS interface.

(Credit: XReal/PCMag)

This view is fixed in place relative to the direction you’re facing thanks to three degrees of freedom (3DOF) motion tracking. The menu and apps will stay in place as you move your head instead of being locked in front of your eyes like typical screen mirroring. It feels much more natural than the locked position you get without motion tracking, but the apps will cut off when they hit the edge of the glasses’ field of view, so it’s not nearly as immersive as the eye-filling mixed reality of the Vision Pro or the Meta Quest Pro ($1,499.99).

The 3DOF tracking also means apps are kept in place in a fixed-distance sphere relative to you; you can’t move closer to them like you can with 6DOF headsets. XReal says the upcoming $699 Air 2 Ultra smart glasses enable 6DOF motion tracking via their cameras.

You can switch to a view that keeps the active window directly in front of your vision regardless of how you move your head by pressing the Mode button on the side of the Beam Pro. This makes the window follow you rather than keeping it locked in the middle of the glasses’ display, which feels a bit odd and floaty.

The incredibly advanced eye-tracking and gesture-tracking controls of the much more expensive Apple headset aren’t present, but instead the Beam Pro itself turns into an air mouse that lets you control a cursor by tilting it. Tapping the touchpad clicks the cursor; swiping left and right scrolls through the apps list; and swiping up and down opens app and settings menus. Swiping is context-sensitive, so inside apps like Chrome, swiping up and down scrolls in those directions. However, pinch-to-zoom doesn’t work, at least in Chrome and Google Maps, which is frustrating.

(Credit: XReal/PCMag)

Android isn’t known for being very multitasking-friendly, and that applies to NebulaOS as well. You can open a number of apps to use at once. Unfortunately, that number is two. Popping up Chrome next to YouTube so you can read and watch at the same time is easy, but if you try to open another app, the interface will tell you to close one of the others. Apps are locked next to each other, so you can move them around only as a single unit, not individually like with apps on the Vision Pro. To be fair, the Beam Pro is an inexpensive Android device with midrange specs, and both the operating system and hardware limit how well it can juggle multiple apps at a time, even without the AR interface.

Whether you use one or two apps, you can move them anywhere in a dome around you, including directly up. You can also resize them, and switch them between a vertical phone-like view and a wider landscape view. Resizing is locked to your chosen aspect ratio, though, so your options are still limited.

NebulaOS has its own XReal Store in addition to the standard Google Play app store, but it’s unnecessary. It has only a dozen or two apps, none unique to the Beam Pro or specifically for AR smart glasses, and all of which are already on Google Play. Effectively all apps will be displayed as floating versions of the phone apps.

Cameras Designed for 3D

Spatial photos and spatial videos are two of the Beam Pro's biggest features, and they work very well. Both types of media are captured in size-by-side formats that double the horizontal resolution of the image to show the full views of each camera. Spatial photos are saved as 22-megapixel images at 7,680 by 2,880, and spatial videos are 3,840 by 1,080. This lets the Beam Pro, or any other device that can output to stereoscopic displays like smart glasses, show 3D images. The iPhone 15 Pro and the Apple Vision Pro do the same thing, and yes, this does mean that spatial photos and videos are ultimately no different than the 3D media we’ve been able to see since Sir Charles Wheatstone conceived the idea in the 1830s. We have two eyes, so all we need are two pictures taken from slightly different positions.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The result is very effective. Viewing spatial photos and videos on a connected XReal Air 2 Pro gives a strong impression of depth. Videos are captured at 60 frames per second, so movement looks fairly natural and not jerky or disorienting. There’s still the potential for motion sickness because any movement in the video is completely separate from how you move your head, but since motion tracking keeps the picture fixed in one place, it isn’t much worse than watching a movie with a very shaky camera on a TV or theater screen.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The cameras don’t fare very well for day-to-day shooting, though. While they use pixel-binned 50MP sensors, their sensor and lens combinations produce slightly fuzzy and noisy photos. Pictures of the city under a bright, cloudy sky show loads of grain; indoor pictures of my cat are even less flattering; and selfies with strong indoor lighting are a little blurry. They look fine zoomed out on the Beam Pro’s screen or social media posts, but they don’t hold up once you start looking closer. The similarly priced Samsung Galaxy A15 5G phone has much better cameras but obviously lacks the spatial photo and video features or the NebulaOS interface.

Verdict: An Interesting AR Accessory

The Beam Pro is a fun device if you want a taste of head-tracking AR, and you already have or are willing to buy a pair of XReal smart glasses. Its NebulaOS interface is a bit more engaging than the typical mirrored screen locked in front of your eyes that most connected devices enable, though it’s still very limited, and it handles multitasking awkwardly. The cameras are a fun novelty and let you take 3D photos and videos you can view on other devices that support stereoscopic 3D. However, they’re mediocre at best for regular snapshots.

The Beam Pro is ultimately a pretty niche AR hub that comes in a phone-size body, functional but not impressive in any way outside of its equipment-specific features. For $199, though, that’s about what you can expect from this sort of device. If you have XReal glasses or are looking for AR smart glasses and haven’t committed to a brand yet, the Beam Pro is a fairly inexpensive accessory that's worth checking out.