New Gear VR New Gear VR redesign doesn’t fix what wasn’t already broken last year
Small design tweaks are largely unnoticeable in this annual update.
Kyle Orland -
The virtual reality market is still new enough that we're seeing plenty of experimentation and iterative design work on the hardware itself. So it's not a huge surprise that Samsung and Oculus are out with a new, redesigned version of the Gear VR, even though it has been less than a year since the device was officially launched as a consumer product (and less than two years since the early "Innovator Edition" hit stores).
For the most part, the new Gear VR works like the old Gear VR. You still use certain Samsung Galaxy phones (anything since the Galaxy Note 5 will work) to provide the display and processing guts. The Gear VR headset itself still provides some crucial extra processing for tracking the angle of your head and a touchpad on the side for basic in-app controls (you can also use bluetooth controllers for more complex games). The Gear VR still can't track your head's position in space, though, so when you lean forward in a Gear VR app, the whole world comes with you in a nauseating fashion.
The main reason for the redesign is the launch of Samsung's Galaxy Note 7, which sports a USB Type-C connection that isn't compatible with last year's Gear VR model. The new Gear VR sports a Type-C docking dongle on the front by default, but that can be slid out and easily replaced with an older USB micro dock for compatibility with older Galaxy phones. The pass-through charging slot on the underside of the Gear VR is also USB Type-C now, though the headset comes with a tiny adapter to take a charge through older cables.