There will be no new Samsung-made headset again this year.
Samsung’s newest phone is a category-dominating powerhouse in every respect. Impressive new cameras, a display tuned specifically to be not just good but good for you, and bigger batteries to power an impressive new processor. What’s not to love, right? Well, for fans of the Gear VR platform that released alongside the last couple of Samsung phones, the silence regarding a hardware refresh for a second year in a row may be a little concerning.
Fortunately for you Gear VR fans, the headset is far from dead. And while you’re not getting a new headset this year, the Galaxy S10, S10+, and S10e will all work just fine with the current headset.
Virtually Impressive
Samsung Gear VR
$105 at Amazon
The best VR headset for Samsung phones.
With its unique controller, touch-capable panel on the side of the headset, and fittings for just about every Samsung phone, the Gear VR delivers a comfortable experience you’ll be able to enjoy for hours on end without strain or soreness.
Whether you’re using the 5.8-inch 2280×1080 resolution display on the Galaxy S10e or the 6.4-inch 3040×1440 resolution display on the Galaxy S10+, you’ll still be able to enjoy the Samsung Gear VR experience. Like the Galaxy Note, you have to adjust the size slider on the Gear VR to fit the larger phone, but the phone will fit in the existing frame with no problem.
The biggest difference, regardless of which Galaxy S10 you have, is the whole display won’t be used to power the Gear VR. The new displays on these phones are much taller than previous models, which means when you put the phone in the headset there’s a lot of pixels that don’t line up with the lenses. This means your Gear VR apps will only draw on the parts of the screen that line up with the display, so if you were looking at the whole screen while it was in the headset there would be black bars on either side of the stuff you were doing in VR.
Basically, you won’t have to worry about the camera cut out interfering with your VR experiences.
Since the Galaxy S10 also includes a microSD card slot, moving your Gear VR experiences from one phone to another should also be super easy. Your VR apps and games will all be available as soon as you sign into your new phone, and you can expect the Snapdragon 855 in this new Galaxy to handle all of your favorites even better than the Galaxy S9. Enjoy!
