Xreal Beam Pro review – simple, affordable, socially acceptable spatial computing?

The Xreal Beam Pro might look like a smartphone (because it pretty much is), but it's one specially designed to fully unleash the potential of Xreal's AR glasses.

Does this $199 accessory to your Xreal glasses succeed at its goal, and does it make for a true Apple Vision Pro killer, for a comparatively low price?

Is it the simpler, socially acceptable and convenient spatial computing option we've been waiting for?

Let's find out!

Jump to:

• How much does the Xreal Beam Pro cost?
• What does the Xreal Beam Pro do?
• When can I buy the Xreal Beam Pro?
• Xreal Beam Pro specs
• Design and build quality
• Setting up the Xreal Beam Pro
• Initial tutorial
• Home screen and AR experience
• Window management, multitasking, app testing
• Spatial cameras – filming and watching spatial videos
• Battery life and charging
• Verdict

How much does the Xreal Beam Pro cost?

The Xreal Beam Pro starts at $199 for the model with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The upper-tier option is 8GB of RAM with 256GB of storage for $249.

Obviously you'd want more RAM for multitasking, but when it comes to storage, if you plan on streaming lots of movies and shows online, or watch YouTube videos – the base 128GB of storage would be fine for you.

However, if you're going to download lots of mobile games, movies and shows on the device itself, it may be worth it to opt in for 256GB of storage.

The good news is that the Xreal Beam Pro has expandable storage of up to 1TB, so buying a microSD card to slot in it could be cheaper, and is an option.

For this review, we're using the base 6GB+128GB Xreal Beam Pro variant.

It's worth pointing out that you'll also need a pair of Xreal glasses, to connect to the Xreal Beam Pro, and get the spatial computing experience we're looking at here.

If you don't have any Xreal glasses yet, Xreal sells bundles that include the Xreal Beam Pro + Xreal Air or Air 2, which start at $498.

You can also check out our individual reviews for Xreal's glasses here:

• Xreal Air review
• Xreal Air 2 review
• Xreal Air 2 Pro review
• Xreal Air 2 Ultra preview

I'm using the Xreal Air 2 with the Beam Pro, for this review.

What does the Xreal Beam Pro do?

By default, Xreal's glasses, like most "AR-capable" glasses on the market, serve as simple screen mirroring devices for your smartphone, gaming console, or computer. You plug them in your phone or, say, Steam Deck, and you get their screen mirrored onto the glasses – that's pretty much it.

But Xreal's glasses have AR capabilities, and can be so much more than simple screen mirroring accessories.

The Xreal Beam Pro, like its predecessor – the Xreal Beam – aims to unleash these glasses' full potential, by enabling their spatial sensors, giving them multitasking features, letting you film and playback spatial video, and more, with its dedicated software and hardware.

So in simple terms – it's an accessory that turns your Xreal glasses into true smart AR glasses, capable of spatial computing, not unlike the Apple Vision Pro, albeit with less power behind it (but also at a much lower price, and in a smaller, socially-acceptable form factor).

Although the Xreal Beam Pro looks like a budget phone, and it pretty much is, its operating system – Nebula OS (based on Android 14, at the time of this review), has AR experiences integrated into it, made especially for Xreal's glasses, and those experiences launch as soon as the glasses are plugged into the device.

And since the Xreal Beam Pro is a Wi-Fi-connected Android device, you can also easily download all kinds of apps and games from the Google Play Store, such as streaming services (YouTube, Netflix), and video players, for watching movies and shows, both online and offline.

When can I buy the Xreal Beam Pro?

The Xreal Beam Pro is already available for purchase from XREAL.com.

According to Xreal, pre-orders for customers who bought the device from XREAL.com have started shipping as of yesterday, July 15, and will be arriving in the coming days.

Xreal Beam Pro specs

Design and build quality

Although we could technically call it a $199 spatial computer, as mentioned earlier the Xreal Beam Pro is basically a budget Android smartphone, but designed with a focus on AR experiences, as opposed to making phone calls.

It's made out of smooth plastic with rounded corners, and with larger top and bottom bezels around the display (as is normal for Android devices at this price point). It also comes in only one color – pearl white.

On the left side of the device we have a tray for an optional microSD card, and on the right – volume and power buttons, above which is also a special "mode button."

On the bottom of the Xreal Beam Pro we have two USB-C ports, one for charging it, and one for connecting your Xreal glasses; so we can do both at the same time – convenient! The latter is also the one to use for USB file transfer, if you ever need it.



The star of the show is arguably on the back – we have two 50-megapixel cameras designed for filming spatial content, which can then be viewed on your Xreal Beam Pro with any Xreal glasses.

Honestly, the Xreal Beam Pro feels pretty good for the price. If this were a regular smartphone, I could see myself using it.

Setting up the Xreal Beam Pro

As you can probably guess, setting up the Xreal Beam Pro is just like setting up any Android smartphone. You go through a couple of simple steps, connect to your Wi-Fi, log into your Google account, make an Xreal account, and choose a PIN code, as it's the only method of locking and unlocking this device.

I made sure to also update the Xreal Beam Pro to its latest software, before using it, and I advise you to do the same.

Other than that – it's simple plug-and-play – just connect your Xreal glasses to the USB-C port on the bottom-right, put on the glasses, and you're in.

Initial tutorial

Upon connecting your glasses to the Xreal Beam Pro for the first time, you get a tutorial that teaches you how to use your new device. It has a couple of grammatical errors here and there, but as a regular Lenovo tablet user, I'm pretty numb to that by now, so long as the thing actually works.

The tutorial is particularly useful to show you how that unusual "mode button" on the Xreal Beam Pro works – it can center your virtual screen, by pressing it once, or switch between two different modes of window behavior – one would have windows follow your head's orientation, the other will keep them fixed to one angle and position.

Step two teaches you how your Xreal Beam Pro can be used as a spatial controller for your content. Its screen basically turns into a touchpad, while the whole device becomes a spatial pointer that you can aim around, and select things with.

I actually got stuck on this step, as it asked me to tap at the center of the touchpad, yet nothing happened and I couldn't proceed, but luckily, this initial tutorial could simply be closed.

Using the Xreal Beam Pro as a spatial pointer is pretty easy and intuitive anyway. But – the setup clearly needs some work.

Home screen and AR experience

Once you're finally into the main AR (augmented reality) homescreen, you'll notice it's pretty Apple Vision Pro-esque. You have a honeycomb arrangement of apps, but instead of using your hands to point and your eyes to click, you use the Xreal Beam Pro as a remote control.

The spatial apps we get out of the box are the tutorial, a video player, a clock, Google's default apps (Files, Chrome, Assistant, YouTube)... There's also an XREAL Store app, which appears to be in a pretty early stage, as it doesn't have a lot to offer right now, in terms of specialized AR experiences, but hopefully it will in the future. I'm not even sure if it loads properly, as images take a while to show up.

At this point I'm noticing that the Xreal Beam Pro's pointer has gone off-center, and I can no longer point it directly at the virtual screen, but have to do it off-axis for the cursor to show up. This seems to happen pretty often. Not ideal, but thankfully you can long-press the mode button on the device to recenter the mouse pointer.

Window management, multitasking, app testing

Let's talk about window management and multitasking on this spatial device.

Now, apps you open pop up in phone-size windows next to one another. You can't lean forward to see them up close, as Xreal's glasses don't have positional tracking, which is understandable, because that'd need cameras, and ruin their thin and light design. But you can turn and look around to see your apps, and use them simultaneously. They will go out of view if you have them fixed somewhere, and look to the side, so the whole "spatial / augmented reality" experience works as intended.

Besides moving them around, you can also change the size of your app windows, because obviously I wanted Chrome running in landscape. You can switch between two predetermined window sizes (medium and large), and between two app window orientations – portrait and landscape. In addition, you can freely make those predetermined window shapes larger or smaller, just not fiddle with their aspect ratios.

Next I wanted to test how many apps you can run at the same time, and evidently – it's two. For example, in the screenshots I have the XREAL Store and Chrome running. When I attempted to open a third app, I was asked to close one of the two apps that were already open.

Now, in fairness, this is a budget device with 6GB of RAM, running Android no less, so I wasn't expecting much, not to mention I don't see myself ever needing to use more than two apps at a time – in my case YouTube and Chrome. So I can live with that.

Speaking of Chrome again – web browsing is a joy, with the Xreal glasses and the Xreal Beam Pro as a remote. You can click with the virtual pointer, scroll through pages intuitively by scrolling your finger on the touchpad, and everything seems to load quickly. No internet speed or performance issues here, which could be in part thanks to that two-app-at-a-time limit.

When you have to type something in, a virtual keyboard pops up on the Xreal Beam Pro's screen, over the touchpad, which makes text input vastly quicker and easier than it is on the Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest 3, with their clunkier virtual keyboards.

After some web browsing I launched YouTube next to Chrome, and played a couple of high definition videos. I was able to up the YouTube quality to 2160p at 60 frames per second, which seems to be the maximum for this device, and a pretty generous one at that – no playback complaints.

Next I wanted to text Netflix, so I headed to the Google Play Store to download the app. At this point I noticed the Xreal Beam Pro was getting kind of warm, which isn't too crazy considering the weather here (90°F / 32°C), but is worth pointing out.

So Netflix works perfectly fine in terms of video quality – videos play in high definition, and are smooth as butter. However, I found that the virtual pointer you use to navigate around can't press the Netflix pause button, or the seek buttons for some reason. Likely an issue with the Netflix app, and likely one of many you may face by just naturally trying out Android apps, due to their varying support for such input methods. So that's something to keep in mind.

To finish up, I should add that as the Xreal Beam Pro is an Android device, you can also connect Bluetooth keyboards, mice, headphones and gaming controllers, if you feel like expanding your spatial computing setup.

You could connect a gaming controller and fire up GeForce Now for some triple-A cloud gaming, or use third party apps from the Google Play Store to stream your PC's screen and game from that, besides regular on-device Android mobile gaming.

Spatial cameras – filming and watching spatial videos

So the Xreal Beam Pro has two 50-megapixel 3D cameras on the back, positioned a bit further from one another than you might be used to seeing them, so they can simulate human eyes, and film 3D content from two reasonably different angles.

The Xreal Beam Pro's camera app has special sections for taking spatial photos, and recording spatial video at up to 1080p, 60 frames-per-second.

You can then watch the spatial content you made with your favorite Xreal glasses, and relive the moments.

Or at least that's the idea. This is one of those cases where you're reminded that it's a $199 device; a price for which you normally can't even get a single good camera, let alone two, for filming spatial content.