The Xreal Beam Pro looks like a smartphone — but it’s not. | Image: Xreal
Xreal has made a name for itself with some surprisingly nice-looking augmented reality glasses, which put a display in front of your eyes so you can do things like watch TV or play games on a giant screen projected just for you. But unlike, say, Apple’s Vision Pro or Meta’s Quest 3, Xreal has no built-in software or content. It’s just a screen in your glasses. This is good in that you can plug in lots of other devices, but it does restrict the sort of things those glasses can do.
The new Beam Pro is Xreal’s latest attempt to bridge that gap. It’s a handheld device with the rough dimensions of a smartphone, but Xreal thinks of it as more of a companion to your glasses. It runs a customized version of Android 14 — Xreal calls it NebulaOS —…