Qualcomm, Samsung, and Google announced their partnership to build the XR headset at the Unpacked event in February 2023. Screenshot by ZDNET
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 pushing the launch of the speaker product to the end of the year.
Separately, Upload VR reports that Samsung has also informed developers that its new headset will now launch at the end of 2024.
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. Samsung’s headphone is expected to be priced at around $2,000, compared At $3,500 for the Apple Vision Pro headset and $500 for the Meta Quest 3 that just launched in October.
Also: I tried the Apple Vision Pro and it’s way ahead of what I expected
This information joins several reports that have emerged since this summer that Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm have decided to go back to the drawing board after Apple announced the Vision Pro at WWDC in June with high-end 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.”
Samsung is designing the hardware for the joint venture’s Quest 3.
At CES 2023, I tested the HTC Vive XR Elite, which is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 chip. Jun One/ZDNet
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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 the next-gen headphones in mid-2024 — perhaps at the summer Unpacked event where it typically unveils its latest foldable phones.