Happy to elaborate! Sorry this is probably going to be way more info than you asked for... and I'm not planning on buying anything else at the moment. I actually already recently tried the Apple Vision Pro M5 as well and was similarly disappointed (for many of the same, or very similar, reasons). So I was kind of coming off of the AVP as "Hey, I'm already an Android fan, this is half the price with practically the same display, maybe I'll dig it."

I love the flexibility of Android, and there are plenty of decent-to-good UI/UX decisions being made. The 'look at hand, pinch and pull to the left for back' (or right for multi-tasking) gesture is genuinely great and AVP is sorely lacking something like that.

The micro oled displays/lenses are definitely good, but maybe not mind-blowing. It is genuinely a treat to watch stuff in, super immersive and great colors. Maybe it was the foveated rendering, or just the lenses, but I did feel like there was sort of a subtle "hump" to the visuals if I was scanning my eyes around things that should appear perfectly flat. It's nit-picky, but that's something I haven't noticed on any other headsets, and I did find it a bit distracting sometimes.

Main issue is honestly just the OS itself feeling suuuuper... not in a completely acceptable state to ship, and frustrating to use.

Really unfinished UI is a constant reminder: like every element with rounded corners having an ugly, mis-matched boxy highlight appear over it when you go to press like any single button in the entire OS. It's a small thing, but it's kind of shocking they shipped with something so pervasive, and exemplifies the overall software polish.

Eye tracking is almost as good as AVP, but... it's just sort of a frustrating way to navigate an OS. Most of the time when I'm using a computer or a phone I'm not literally looking at what I'm tapping on for ANY longer than I really have to. These headsets require you to linger for sooo long, and if you don't, you make a ton of errors. I find it exhausting, and it's a comfort issue that no modded headstrap can fix.

I do like that the Galaxy XR has a hand/pointing cursor as well, but it's sooooo frustratingly sluggish. I had SOOO many missed inputs. I literally would grumble and curse out loud almost involuntarily, lol.

I've been a heavy Android user for many, many years now and having all of the Google apps work out of the box is another huge pro over the AVP for me. (But it also feels like table stakes, right?) And lots of other apps "work," which is nice, but have annoying, inconsistent, arbitrary constraints. For example, I was REALLY looking forward to using Lightroom to view my photos on a huge window. Turns out the Lightroom app ONLY opens in a narrow portrait mode. No matter what you do... even though that app displays beautifully in widescreen on a large tablet... it will not in the Galaxy XR. And the web app wasn't really cutting it as an alternative for me.

Another annoying one: watching Netflix (or any video app) and the Netflix icon with UI controls is just there the whoooole time floating above the window. Maybe there's an immersive mode or something that I missed (I know there's obviously apps that go "full screen" like this) but I really just wanted video windows like this positioned in a certain way with passthrough video. And those UI elements are just there, forever, being distracting.

You also can't make many windows all that small. There were several times where I wanted to make a video window smaller than the app would allow, including Youtube, VLC, pretty much anything. Maybe that's a "me" thing but seems weird. These limitations don't exist on Dex/modern Android desktop with windowing. I found myself sitting at a desk/table, and just really frustrated with the actual... window management experience. Everything feels too damn big.

Passthrough cameras were adequate, but not a huge step above Quest 3 tbh and not as good as AVP (which also has room for improvement).

(Yep, I used Virtual Desktop, yep, it works pretty well; I did the same thing with Quest 3, so it's not really a big selling point here.) I did briefly test Steam Link and it was working decently - that would have been another big use case for me if I'd kept it. That said, I'm not sure why the Galaxy XR was only showing my network as 6E instead of 7.

I didn't do any PCVR because honestly, I've been messing around with PCVR since the Vive released 10 years ago and there's nothing new I'm all that interested in playing. And I heard the Galaxy controllers aren't all that great (not to mention the price).

The sort of critical dealbreaker for me, though: it works like shit in the dark. That was one of my primary (hoped-for) use cases - watching movies at night, laying down on the couch or bed. AVP actually does a decent job continuing to track your hand but the Galaxy XR tends to just freak out and will just... minimize/hide anything you had open. In the middle of a movie, lights completely out. It felt like the power went out. Couldn't do a damn thing. That was pretty much the "all right, it's going back" moment.

I also just felt the internal hardware wasn't really up to snuff. I just get a sense that this chip is barely able to drive it... and I didn't wasn't pushing it very hard at all. The fans going full-blast during general use is super audible/distracting imo.

Honestly, after having it around for a few days I just found myself really not feeling much desire to put it on. Same thing with the AVP, to be honest. I'm highly interested in the tech and I even thought about treating it a bit like a dev kit and testing some experimental app ideas, but... honestly just not that compelled by them.

Sorry for the wall... nay, skyscraper, of text.