Samsung confirms Android XR headset coming this year

At its Galaxy Unpacked event this week Samsung appeared to give a timeline for its upcoming Android XR headset.

During the event Samsung’s President and Head of the Mobile Experience Business TM Roh referenced the “new XR platform coming this year”, and Google’s Senior Vice President of Platforms and Devices Rick Osterloh confirmed Google is still involved.

Back in November South Korean newspaper The JoongAng reported Samsung was planning to announce the headset at an event in the second half of 2024 then launch it in December, and UploadVR independently confirmed that Samsung told developers it plans to launch in late 2024.

These revelations and statements didn’t come out of the blue.

In early 2023 Samsung officially announced it was working on an XR headset, with Google handling the system software via a new variant of Android, now known to be called Android XR, and Qualcomm providing the chipset.

At the start of this year Qualcomm confirmed that chip will be Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2, a higher-end variant of the base XR2 Gen 2 used in Meta Quest 3.

At last year’s I/O Google said it would “share more” about Android XR and Samsung partnership later that year, but that didn’t end up happening. It was announced at last year’s I/O reportedly that Qualcomm would “share more” about Android XR and Samsung partnership later in the same year. However, this did not happen. While Samsung is the first to adopt Android XR as a hardware platform, The Information Apple Vision Pro reports that Google also pitched it to other manufacturers – although there has been no news of them accepting. The Information

that Google has also been pitching it to other hardware makers – though there have not yet been any reports of them accepting.