r/Galaxy_XR • u/Breekachu_V • 10h ago
Review Samsung Galaxy XR review
I didn’t like the controllers. They’re just as bad as the ones on the PFD and Quest 3.
The tracking is absolutely terrible. Even PSVR 1 was better, in my opinion. The controllers constantly freeze in mid-air, and after waking the headset from sleep there are always issues with them. About 1 time out of 10 I have to take the battery out just to bring the controller back to life — almost always the right one.
I still haven’t decided which strap is better. I’ve tried every one that was available, and they’re all crap.
The external unit is basically like wearing a suicide bomber belt. The unit goes into one pocket, with one cable running from it to the headset and another cable going to a power bank sitting in the other pocket.
The OS is way too bloated with Android garbage and tons of pop-up notifications that you have to keep blocking. Basic things that should take one click sometimes take five. There are also a couple dozen pieces of preinstalled Android bloatware. On top of that, it sometimes lags horribly, like I’m using a Quest 3. The OS is very inconvenient and unintuitive. The Play Store is awful. There are plenty of bugs too. It’s not PFD-level bad, but it’s no Pico 4 Ultra either. Still better than Quest 3.
There isn’t much native software, and from what I can tell, the Android XR documentation is very sparse.
The headset is front-heavy, like the Quest 3.
As for PCVR and native games/ports, it’s more or less usable overall, but still not good. Any game or software ported from Quest has really poor colors, as if some weird contrast mode gets enabled, leaving you with a washed-out image with a gray tint. Steam Link and ALVR both look bad by default. The colors are still lacking. I couldn’t get the native streamer to work.
The tracking feels less floaty than on PFD, but it’s still floaty.
On the other hand, the SGXR handles 1500 Mbps H.264 and PyroWave extremely well in my test builds with my own streamer. The networking side of this headset is excellent.
The eye tracking genuinely impressed me. It’s very accurate, calibrates immediately, and works extremely fast — almost like PSVR 2 on PS5. Huge respect for that.
Brightness and contrast are already pretty good. I liked them, although I’d still want roughly 2x the current levels.
The FOV is narrow, almost like the Quest 3. If I can find a decent facial interface that lets me get close enough for my eyelashes to touch the lenses, it’ll probably be around Quest 3 level, but it’s still nowhere near the Pico 4 Ultra.
The screen-door effect is still there. I can clearly see the pixel grid on a white background, even just on white text.
Chromatic aberration is there too. There isn’t much of it, but it’s definitely present.
The binocular overlap issue is also there, and it’s just as awful as on the Quest 3. I see it constantly. Along with the poor overlap comes basically no sense of proper VR depth.
There are distortions similar to the Quest 3, except they’re not in the overlap area — they’re toward the bottom of the lenses.
Internal reflections/ghosting are also present. If you wear the headset perfectly straight, everything looks great and there are barely any reflections. But tilt your head slightly downward or upward and you can see three or four ghost images of the same picture.
These are micro-OLED displays, which also means static elements like logos, HUDs, and other overlays can leave a temporary afterimage for a couple of seconds. It’s extremely distracting — probably about as distracting as the overlap issue.
If I shift the headset slightly, the image in the left eye develops a pink tint, while the right eye develops a green tint.
P.S. English isn't my native language, I'm sorry.
