Qualcomm, Samsung, and Google announced their partnership to build the XR headset at the Unpacked event in February 2023. Screenshot by ZDNET/Samsung
According to new reports from Upload VR and Korean newspaper The JoonAng, the XR alliance formed by Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm to build a mixed reality headset has hit the reset button on their project and delayed the launch.
JoonAng reports that Samsung has now commissioned higher-resolution displays from Samsung Display for its This contributed to delaying the announcement of the Samsung speaker from early 2024 to mid-2024 and pushed the launch of the speaker to the end of the year.
JoonAng’s sources also claim that the production target for Samsung’s headphones will be a modest 30,000 units for 2024. In comparison, Apple’s production targets have also been trimmed from 1 million to 400,000 units of the Vision Pro for 2024.
Also: I tried the Apple Vision Pro and it’s way ahead of what I expected
Separately, Upload VR reports that Samsung has also informed developers that its new headset will now launch at the end of 2024.
This information joins several reports that have surfaced since this summer that Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm decided to go back to the drawing board after Apple announced Visio Pro at WWDC in June with cutting-edge specifications that surprised the industry. However, late at its Unpacked event in July, Samsung talked about its own headphone announcement being “not too far away.”
Samsing is designing the hardware needed for the joint venture’s XR headsets, while Google is developing a mixed reality version of Android, and Qualcomm is supplying the underlying chip technology — likely the Snapdragon Just in October.
also: I tried out Meta’s Quest 3 VR headset and the mixed reality experience was next level
This kind of reset is reminiscent of the birth of Android, when Google was designing its smartphone platform to be a BlackBerry-like system until it saw Apple announce the iPhone and then started over. Instead, it transformed Android into a multi-touch interface much like the iPhone, and Samsung quickly became the leading and best-selling device manufacturer for Android.
If this leaked prototype of the headset — clearly designed in the mold of the Oculus Quest and early HTC Vive headsets — is real, it’s a positive move by the trio to reboot their plans. I expect Samsung to design a more compelling hardware product by the time we finally get a look at its next-gen headphones in mid-2024 — perhaps at the summer Unpacked event where it typically unveils its latest foldable phones.