Who Should Get the Galaxy XR Headset - DTNS 5130

0:02This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 22, 2025. We tell you what you need to know. We follow up on context and we understand why we need to wear things on our face. Today, Jason Howell got his hands on the new Samsung Galaxy XR headset. He's going to tell us who it's for, if anyone. Yeah. Is it for your face? I don't know. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Samsung announced its version of the Apple Vision Pro and Jason Howell has had a chance to play with it already. So we chatted earlier about what it is and what he thinks of it.

0:42So Jason, you got the early insight on Samsung's big announcement from yesterday. Tell us what they announced and what you think of it. Yeah, I got to go out to New York City a week ago. Samsung invited me out. They actually flew me out to go to this event and check out Galaxy XR, which if you remember a year ago, almost a year ago, there was kind of like a press, a small kind of controlled press thing that, again, I was invited to. I was very fortunate to go see a very early version of this headset when it was called Project Muhan. You've probably heard that over the course of the last year because they've been kind of teasing it.

1:21Now they're officially releasing it. In fact, the official release was last night. It's called Galaxy XR. We have a price,$1799.99, although I should just go ahead and say$1 ,800. It's half the price of an Apple Vision Pro. Half the price of an Apple Vision Pro. Definitely more expensive than the MetaQuest, which is kind of like the VR headset, which I guess you could also call it XR. I mean, where are those lines drawn? It's kind of hard to say. Yeah, it does some pass-through stuff. So it's kind of squarely in the middle between those two. And yeah, I mean, it's a really nice, sharp piece of hardware.

2:02It's very light, it's very comfortable. The materials really reminded me, to a certain degree anyways, of the Apple Vision Pro. It's not just like a big, hunky piece of plastic. It really has this kind of like large, metallic, glassy quality to it that makes it seem like it's definitely a level above something like the MetaQuest, which really has that plasticky feel. But yeah, so I think if you were to compare it to a headset, you'd probably compare it more to the Apple Vision Pro than you would the MetaQuest. Not something you're going to be wearing around town? No, I mean, these are VR headsets.

2:43Although this is one of the really kind of interesting kind of takeaways that I had after experiencing this headset now two or three times over the last year, which is that one of the things that I really noticed when I put on this headset a year ago, and then definitely this last time in New York, is the quality of pass-through. Pass-through seems like this technology that when I've experienced it before, it's like a utility to kind of give you a gut check that you're not going to run into a couch or whatever. It's there to serve a purpose, but it doesn't really go much beyond that. When I put this headset on, the pass-through quality was immaculate.

3:24Things look sharp. Things look clear. Suddenly, that pass-through for me didn't feel like this little utility mode that I just get out of really quick, you could consider wearing this, not that you'd want to, but wearing this around the house and putting the Gemini integration, which is another big key component of this headset to work from a contextual perspective in your life. And I mean, most people are not going to do that, right? We're not going to walk around downtown wearing a Galaxy XR to the bodega and, you know, wearing your Galaxy XR. But yeah, it's not meant to be that. It's not meant to be that.

4:05But I guess my point was that, you know, it's based on Android XR. Android, this is kind of one of the premier first kind of examples of Google's, you know, next XR OS, which is based on Android, of course, Gemini at the core. And so Android XR is really targeting not just VR and XR headsets like this, but also smart glasses, AI glasses, and whatever comes next. And what I would say from my experience with this headset is, I don't expect Samsung to sell an insane amount of these devices because it kind of feels like the VR thing is a little on the other side of the curve right now. All the energy is with smart glasses.

4:48But I think this device does a fantastic job of demonstrating the value of a quality pass-through that represents reality coupled with an incredibly useful contextually driven Gemini AI system to bring meaning to the world that is there. It's like when you use that in the headset, the smart glasses thing becomes far more understandable. And it's like, oh, man, now I can see why that is exciting. Well, classic, classic first gen product where you're like, oh, I like what it does. I can't wait until dot, dot, dot. It gets smaller. It gets easier to carry around. It has better battery life. Let's actually talk a little bit about the specs.

5:31How good is the display? How long is the battery life? All that stuff. Yeah, well, I mean, the display is 4K per eye. They're micro OLEDs. They look fantastic, up to 90 hertz refresh. That is definitely one of the things that I noticed immediately is, wow, the quality of these displays. You know, I'm just used to seeing little pixels and little screen door effect and all that kind of stuff, and I really didn't catch it with this. Now, longer-term use, and maybe I'll clue into those. Obviously, I've only had maybe a total of about an hour and a half with this headset between a year ago and now.

6:03But really fresh display. Battery-wise, it uses an external battery pack. So you have to have the little pack in your pocket or whatever, and it wires up to the side of the headset. It has this nice little metallic joint that it connects to. Around two to two and a half hours of general use is what they're saying. Obviously, I haven't tested that, but that's what they're saying. I would love to put that through its paces. And it is because that battery is separate. It means that the headset itself is very comfortable. It's super lightweight. It actually, I noticed that a year ago. And then this time again, putting it on, you kind of forget that it's on there, even though it is a larger headset compared to something like glasses.

6:47It's 545 grams. As far as these things are concerned, it's pretty darn light. Especially my experience with the MetaQuest headsets where it's all integrated. I like that they've separated the two. Putting it next to the Apple Vision Pro, what do you think are its advantages or if there's any shortcomings compared to the Apple Vision Pro? Because we're talking about a big price difference here. On the surface, it seems pretty comparable. Yeah, I would say that there's a lot of through lines. Now, granted, I do not own an Apple Vision Pro. I have only spent probably a total of like two hours inside of Apple Vision Pro.

7:25So I don't have a huge amount, a wealth of experience with the Apple Vision Pro. What I've experienced, though, this headset does spatialization very, very well. It's really effective. And I think the strength of what Samsung has here and what Google is offering with Android XR is the integration, is the crosstalk and actually the deep integration of Gemini AI into the OS. They said time and time again, this isn't just a matter of us taking the OS and then we load a Gemini app on top. They built this OS with Gemini, they say, at the core. And you feel it when you're experiencing it. Google's AI, the Gemini AI is pretty powerful in a lot of ways outside of glasses.

8:11But then you bring it in there and you get that multimodal context. You get Everything that it sees out of the cameras, everything that's on the screen, everything that's on your face, because there are down facing cameras that pick up your facial expressions and those get translated into onscreen avatars. All of these signals are fed into, with your permission, of course, the Gemini context window. And that just enables Gemini to be kind of like a co-pilot throughout the experience. It's like part of the OS is driven by Gemini if you choose to operate it that way. And it's pretty comfortable doing so.

8:49You don't have to remember the syntax. I mean, that's a real key selling point, in my opinion, of what we have here. Yeah. Well, in the end, it doesn't sound like this is going to be the thing that makes everybody get into mixed reality, but it's pointing the way towards what these can do. if you had to say, oh, this is for someone? Do you have an idea of who that someone is? I mean, I kind of feel like that someone is someone who is already kind of friendly or curious or interested and driven by the idea of immersive VR, you know, and XR and that sort of stuff. Someone who's considering the meta quest, right?

9:30Like it's kind of like I've said a few times, it's a step up from the meta quest. And if the meta quest is something that gets your engine going. This is the next evolution of that, and it's really polished. It takes itself a little more seriously than what MetaQuest is offering. Obviously, it comes with a price tag that offers a little bit more. The real thing that is here is the immersive quality and the spatialization. They have auto... Oh, by the way, this is an unreleased feature that they're going to release sometime in the future. Auto-spatialization of anything that passes through the headset.

10:05And so I was able to test it on a YouTube video of an NBA game, 20 milliseconds of latency to do the processing in real time. So I was watching just a TV broadcast of an NBA game, and all the players on the court were in three dimensions. And it was all happening in real time, and it was really darn convincing. Which is something Apple is doing with the NBA the hard way, and you're saying they're just able to do it on the fly. Oh, yeah. They were just like, pick out a video. I picked that one. And were there little imperfections here and there? If I looked really closely, there was one player's head who was like the head kept snapping in between like with the body and behind.

10:40But it's okay. Like it's happening in real time, 20 milliseconds latency. And those are the kind of immersive qualities of a headset like this where people want to block out the outside world and just kind of go in for a few hours. And that's who this is for, is for someone who that sounds appealing to. Is it a useful everyday companion? And am I going to wear this at my workstation and do all my work in here? I'm not. Maybe some people listening are. But, you know, and I'm sure it's fully capable of that. But, yeah, I think it's really for the people who are friendly with the idea of kind of closing out the world and going into a little bit of a zone that is very immersive.

11:23Fantastic. Well, Jason, thanks for sharing the scoop with us. Appreciate that. Of course, you'll be back on the show on Friday with Wen. and if people want to find more of your thoughts about this and anything Android-based, of course, there's Android Faithful, right? Android Faithful. I also have a video that went up last night about this headset and really diving deeper into my thesis around this being a really good example of the strength of the future of smart glasses. Thanks so much, Jason. Thank you. A couple more things to note. The Galaxy XR can also connect to your PC, so you can use Steam Link or even just use it like a VR headset.

12:00From what Jason said there and how interoperable it is, I feel like it's a lot more compelling than the Vision Pro, but still, I'm not sure what I would use it for. Sarah, you have a Vision Pro. What's your impression of this? Well, first of all, this is way more affordable, even though it's not a MetaQuest affordable. So yeah, that's kind of the sweet spot, I feel like. It's like, you've got the Vision Pro, which is just cost prohibitive for most people. And then you've got the meta quest, which is, I mean, it's not free, but you know, three 99. Right. And then you've got the galaxy XR somewhere in the middle.

12:43And I feel like Jason is kind of struggling to be like, this is why you need this thing. He's like, it's cool. Yeah. It's cool. But am I going to use it all day, every day? No. And I think that that's the promise that we keep getting from these headsets. And people are like, yeah, but I'm not going to do that. Yeah. Did it make you think, oh, I would rather try that than the Vision Pro? Or the fact that you've already got the Vision Pro mean like, nah, I'm fine with that? No, I'm fine with it. Yeah. Yeah. I have the expensive model. I think what will likely be more popular are the glasses that use Android XR.

13:27Jason alluded to that. And Samsung, during their announcement yesterday, mentioned they will partner with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to create smart glasses. So where Meta has Ray-Bans and Oakley, Samsung is going to have Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Well, DTNS is made possible by all of you listening to us right now. Thanks to Carmine Bailey, Chris Beneteau, and Jeffrey Zilks. Thank you, every single one of you.

14:00There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. At GM's software event, the company announced quite a few things, actually, including plans for new features coming to its vehicles over the next three years. Starting with select 2026 models and all new models after that, GM will include Google's Gemini to let you talk naturally to your car, at least in theory. GM plans to build its own custom assistant in the years to come, but did not share a timeline for that. Also, an Advanced Driver Assistance System, or ADAS, will let drivers take their eyes off the road and will first come to the Cadillac Escalade IQEV in 2028, so not tomorrow, but it's on the roadmap, before expanding to other models.

14:49It'll run on an NVIDIA Drive AGX Thor chip. The system will use LiDAR and multiple other sensors with a new unified computer core that uses three aggregators to receive data and also send commands. GM says this will result in 10 times more OTA software update capacity, 1000 times more internal bandwidth for faster responses, and 35 times more AI performance. And starting in 2026. So, well, we're almost in 2026. now that I think about it. GM will offer an energy home system, including bi-directional vehicle charging and a stationary home battery. You can charge your car from the battery or use your car's battery to power the home.

15:35Leasing of the system will start with all electric vehicle owners before expanding to others. Yeah, specifically GM's owners before expanding to others. But yeah, that's pretty fantastic that they are planning all of this stuff and announcing it. But the one thing that stuck out to me was the fact that they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to do to Gemini what we did to CarPlay. We're going to replace it with our own system down the line. Because GM really does want to have control and make all the profit off of all of these systems. Well, and I get any car manufacturer would want that. I feel like it's a losing battle, personally.

16:15But I also am a person who's used CarPlay for quite some time now. So, you know, there are other options. Sure. Yeah. Also, worth noting that GM has changed its strategy quite a bit. It's changed its name quite a bit. The compute system they're talking about, this unified system, does look real. And it is built on things like their unified systems that they've done in the past. It really is a simplified thing. I think that is the tangible advance that they have here that is real. A lot of this other stuff, I'm curious if they bring that ADAS system in the model that they're talking about or if it gets delayed.

16:54These things end up being a lot harder to make work to the level of satisfaction that will meet regulatory approval and make customers trust it. I mean, as soon as you're like, you can take your eyes off the road, everyone's like, hold on a second. Well, you have the bell curve, right? There's people like, I will never do that. And then there's the people who are like, oh, I was already doing that, even though I shouldn't have been. Speaking of AI and people who don't trust it, more than 1 ,337 people have signed a statement on superintelligence that calls for a prohibition on its development until there is a broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably and have strong public buy-in.

17:41It doesn't actually define superintelligence. over intelligence in the statement, but we all know what they mean. The statement raises concerns about human economic obsolescence, disempowerment, loss of freedom, civil liberties, loss of dignity, loss of control, national security risks, and even potential human extinction is mentioned in this statement. First few signatures are from the usual suspects, computer scientists starting with Nobel laureate Jeffrey Hinton, who has been on record that he is concerned about this for a long time, along with deep learning pioneer Joshua Bengio. Hinton, Bengio, and Jan Lacoon all jointly received the Turing Award in 2018 for their work on deep learning.

18:22Lacoon is more optimistic, so he's not signing on to this. He's somebody who doesn't think we need to be as worried as these folks do. Following Bengio and Hinton on the list is the director of the Center for Human Compatible AI at Berkeley, Stuart Russell, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson. And then it descends into a bunch of media personalities and former governmental officials. Harry and Meghan signed it. That's getting a lot of attention. But the top of this list has some pretty credible people saying, you know what? Maybe we should just stop work on this until we're sure.

18:57Yeah, well, I don't think that. I think that ship has sailed. Nobody's stopping work on superintelligence. But I definitely empathize, I guess, with people who are worried about this. I just think this is our new normal. So, I mean, you know, besides a bunch of companies just going bankrupt and not working on this anymore. It's more of like, how do we use this to our advantage so that humans don't feel like we've lost our dignity? I mean, that sounds horrible, right? It's like, nobody wants to lose that. But, you know, what does that really mean? Or extinction. You know, I'm against extinction.

19:45Yeah. I don't want to become extinct. Yeah. And to be clear, these folks are not saying stop work on ChatGPT. They're saying stop researching the stuff down the road. that can think for itself. I would have liked a definition of super intelligence because there are lots of different ones out there, but I know they're not talking about the stuff we're using today. They're talking about developing the stuff. And I think what they hope is they can get governments to crack down and say, you have to stop meta open AI. I don't care what your business model is. You cannot develop this. It's against the law.

20:20Thing is, when you do that, you now make that development go underground. Or you leave it to a government that doesn't want to play along, and then they have it in their hands. And I don't care what that government is, whether it's the US, China, or somebody else, the government that resists this call and says, no, we are going to allow it is probably less trustworthy than the governments that would play along. So you're ending up putting it in the least trustworthy hands no matter what happens. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, YouTube has added a couple new features. Let's talk about them. First, for users, you can now turn on a setting that sets a time limit on how long you can scroll through YouTube Shorts.

21:03Maybe you're just doing it too much. When you get to the limit that you yourself set, scrolling is then paused and YouTube delivers a notification that you've reached your limit for the day. You can, of course, dismiss the notification and keep scrolling it. Won't lock you out. For creators, YouTube is also offering something called likeness detection. So if you're in the YouTube partner program, you can upload a government ID and a video of yourself to verify your identity. Then you'll provide source material for the system to use to identify video that has you in it. Basically, you're just taking back control.

21:42If somebody uses a video generator to make a fake version of you without your consent, the system will flag it. And I mean, if it works properly, right. And you can request that it be removed. Yeah. So it's like copyright. It's like content ID, except for faces. I assume a lot of people working at YouTube are just, you know, shaking their heads at all of the false positives that they're going to get about this. But at the same time, more power to creators. Good thing. Yeah. And I can't wait for the parade of stories of where the system gets it wrong or fails to protect someone because those are inevitable.

22:23No system is perfect and it'll have some gaps. But this is not a surprise. Also, the scrolling thing, I think, is fine. And obviously, it's not going to lock you out because it's like you are only letting yourself down if you dismiss that notification. it is interesting to me that these companies without having to be forced to do it are offering these sorts of systems. Instagram has a similar one. TikTok has some similar things because they are reaching the limit of knowing we want people to feel like they can continue to use our platform rather than just say, no, I won't use it at all because I can't control myself.

23:02Well, and enjoy it, right? It's like at the point that someone's like, I'm addicted to shorts. It's like, that's not great. That doesn't sound good to other people. You want someone to be like, oh, this is really fun. I only do it, you know, for a certain amount of time per day. It's not unlike, you know, just the idea that, you know, you should never have the cell phone in the bedroom. Not everybody feels that way. Some people feel like that's really helpful so that they just don't use their phone all night. Yeah. Yeah. Google has once again claimed to demonstrate quantum advantage in a quantum computer, but this time it is a little different, for real.

23:44Quantum advantage is a term for when a quantum computer can do something better than a classical computer. And there have been claims of quantum advantage in the past where they demonstrated it being faster, but then other people said, yeah, but if you have the classical computer, do it a different way. The classical computer is faster. Theoretically, there are a lot of things quantum computers can do better, but demonstrating it in a working device has proven more difficult. What we've got today is Google scientists publishing a paper in the journal Nature that came out Wednesday describing an algorithm called quantum echoes running on a quantum chip that simulates the way atoms interact and other examples of quantum mechanics in nature.

24:25So it's simulating quantum mechanics on a quantum computer. The algorithm was demonstrated running 13 ,000 times faster on the quantum system than on a classical system. They were able to replicate the results on a second quantum computer, something they had not been able to do in previous examples of quantum advantage. That is a big deal. So now if somebody else can replicate it on their quantum computer, that would be a big deal as well. However, they did not claim that this algorithm had a practical use. They were able to get this algorithm to work, but it's not something you can really use.

24:56They do believe the technique could be applied to algorithms that do have a more practical benefit and in fact published a second paper describing applying this technique for nuclear magnetic residents, but they did it on a less powerful system that did not work faster than a classical system. So we're inching closer, right? But we still don't have a practical use for a quantum computer most of the time. After everything you said, I was like struggling hard to be like, and this is how we help humanity. Yeah. But I don't know. I feel like we're all kind of like, ah, we don't know yet. We're not quite there yet.

25:36This is what research looks like, right? You inch closer. You make an advance. You figure something out. You're able to replicate the result, right? But you don't immediately the first day go like, and we've solved cancer. You've got to inch forward on that. It gets messy because people want to claim first and they get mad at each other and all that. But if you take that out of it, this is good. We're making a little progress in this. Well, good on you, scientists. Yeah. Finally, some quick headlines that are just good to know. If you want to understand the news in the future, pay attention to these.

26:07Nikkei's supply chain sources say that Apple has cut orders for the iPhone Air parts to 10 % of what they were back in September. Those are levels normally seen near the end of production. Are people not buying it? Maybe not. It happened to Samsung. Labels on packaging for the new Apple Vision Pro with an M5 chip indicate it was assembled in Vietnam, unlike the original Vision Pro, which was assembled in China. Baidu's Apollo Go unit will test a fully autonomous taxi service in Switzerland starting in December, with the goal to launch the service to the public in partnership with public transit company Postbus in Q1 of 2027.

26:50Netflix revenue grew 17 % on the air, thanks in part to its best ad sales quarter yet. That's different. Selling ads is a big Netflix revenue generator, though the company missed on profit due to a tax dispute in Brazil. Meta's chief AI officer, Alexander Wang, told employees in a memo that the company will cut around 600 jobs from its Fair AI Research Lab as it staffs up its TBD lab, though it believes, or at least tells employees, that most of them will be able to find other jobs within the company. Hackers at Pwn2Own Ireland exploited 34 unique zero-day vulnerabilities on day one, collecting$522 ,500 in cash and making multiple devices more secure in the process.

27:37And Tinder announced Wednesday that it's expanding its face check system. So if you're a new user of the dating app, you need to verify your identity with a video selfie that's checked against your profile picture. Make sure you're who you say you are. Indeed. If you want to see who we are, you can check out our live streams. In fact, on Wednesday, we always premiere Live With It. Dan Campos talked today about his Rode wireless mic. I did office hours earlier this week. We've got DTNS live on Thursday. Catch them all. Become a subscriber at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. We like to end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom.

28:18Today, Jay reports on his use case for OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas browser. Yeah, Jay said, I learned from this show, Daily Tech News show, about the Atlas browser and immediately had a use case. I've been experimenting with codecs alongside Cursor and Copilot. But one thing that always bugged me is that none of these tools could look at the results of their work on screen. They can review the code better than I can at time and run curl to get a peek at the actual HTML, but they can't execute JavaScript and they can't look at the screen the way a human could. So it was always a challenge to describe what I was seeing to the agent in a way that helped them produce the kinds of changes I was asking for.

28:59But with agent in the Atlas browser, I can open the pages in the browser, ask Atlas to help me describe what I'm seeing or even help me diagnose why I'm not seeing what I expect. Then I feed that into codex with some tweaks usually and get better results more quickly and with less token usage. One interesting thing that I've discovered already is that Atlas is doing something slightly different with colors than Chrome does, even though they are both based on Chromium. And of course, I asked Agent to explain why that was, and it did a pretty good job of telling me. I won't be using it as a daily driver, but I've already found it pretty useful for some stuff that I do every day.

29:37I want to know what was the reason that the colors were different? Go ask Atlas. It'll tell you. Exactly, exactly. Well, thanks so much, Jay. And if you're thinking about something, got something on your mind, something that we've talked about on the show, an insight to a tech story in general, do share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks to Jason Howell for sharing the scoop on the Galaxy XR. Thanks to Jay for your contribution to today's show. Thank you, listener, for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business. Become a patron. Do it right now. There's no delay.

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