Quick Summary
Samsung's Vision Pro rival has been delayed because execs feel it doesn't "dazzle" enough. But it's now reportedly coming in October, with a consumer launch in March 2025.
We've known for some time that Samsung is working on a mixed reality headset to rival Apple's Vision Pro and Meta's Quest. But Samsung's late-2023 hints that an announcement would be coming soon turned out to be overly optimistic: nearly a year on and there's still nothing official. But that's about to change. A new report says that Samsung is working towards an official reveal in October 2024.
The strategy appears to be similar to that of Apple. It announced its headset in June 2023 but consumers couldn't order one until early 2024, and only in America; it's only just rolling out to countries such as the UK now. The report says that Samsung's launch will be similarly staggered, with the headset launching as a developer version before the end of this year and a consumer launch in March 2025.
What do we know about Samsung's Vision Pro rival?
We don't know a great deal. The device, codenamed "moohan", is built by Samsung and powered by a Qualcomm system. The operating system is Android XR. But the Business Insider report sharing the launch plans leaves a lot of questions unanswered, such as what we'll actually see in October: if the emphasis is on developers, the focus may be more on the operating system than on any hardware.
One interesting quote in the story suggests that the development of this headset hasn't been going smoothly. Samsung apparently did intend to launch the headset in the first quarter of 2024, but its plans have been repeatedly postponed because Samsung execs were "fearing the device isn't yet good enough to dazzle users."
The report also shares speculation that Samsung also plans to make augmented reality glasses using Google's AR platform "according to two employees familiar with the matter". While Samsung is in, Google is reportedly out; rather than make its own hardware as it did with Google Glass, Google is leaving it to third parties this time around. As the report notes, that should reassure manufacturers that Google isn't going to come and compete with them as it does with its Pixel phones.
