Reivew samsung s7gear vr

Samsung and Oculus think they have successfully transformed the Galaxy S7 into a portable entertainment platform for your face.

The jump from niche techy gadget to consumer-ready product isn't an easy one to make, but that's exactly what Samsung is trying to do with the Samsung Gear VR.

Asking someone who has never used a VR headset before — which is most people — to shell out $99 for a plastic accessory that makes them look funny isn't going to happen. Giving hundreds of thousands of them away to people who are pre-ordering the best phone to use with that headset is a little different. It's an attempt to get as many people as possible past the look of the strange plastic thing on the shelf and into the experiences contained within. It's also working, though to what degree is anyone's guess for now.

If Samsung and Oculus are going to succeed in pushing the Gear VR out of techy nerd hell and onto the faces of people who would otherwise never consider something like this, a combination of capable hardware and feature complete software needs to exist. Previous combinations of Samsung phones and the Gear VR headset have shown that smartphone-based VR can be fun and engaging, but not exactly easy for everyone. With the Galaxy S7 and a fully stocked Oculus Store, the Gear VR gets a new chance to pull people in.

This is our Samsung Gear VR review, Galaxy S7 edition.

About this review

We've been using the Samsung Gear VR for quite a while now, back as far as the Galaxy Note 4, but have only been using it with the Galaxy S7 for ten days. This phone is running Oculus Store version 1.91 (Build 25307937), which is also available on the Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy Note 5, and the Samsung Galaxy S6 variants.

Read: How the Galaxy S7 edge compares to the GS7 in the Gear VR

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Samsung Gear VRinitial setup

Samsung and Oculus have built the Gear VR experience to be something isolated from the rest of the experience on the Galaxy S7. The user isn't aware that any of the Oculus services even exist on the phone until the first time they connect the phone to a Gear VR. This can be a little confusing if you're already familiar with the interface and want to download games ahead of putting the headset on your face, but as far as set up systems go Oculus has done a lot of good here. You connect the phone to the headset, and the phone immediately knows what to do.

For a system that isn't dedicated to this experience, the initial set up process for the Gear VR is as good as it can be.

What happens next is not so smooth. The thing the phone does next is tell you to disconnect the phone from the Gear VR in order to install the Oculus app and set up your account. There's no way to do this setup in VR, and there's no way to set up the Oculus experience before the phone is connected, so users are stuck with this back and forth in order to get set up the first time. The good news is you only ever have to do this once, but it's still an unusual hurdle to jump for someone who has never used VR before.

After you've created your Oculus account, it's time to actually use the Gear VR. Putting the phone back into the headset launches a tutorial on how to navigate the interface. Oculus has created a series of short tasks for users to solve by moving across the touch pad on the side of the headset, and when those tasks are complete users are taken to the main system environment. From this point, connecting the phone to the Gear VR launches the Oculus VR environment.

As initial setup experiences go, the Gear VR is a mixed bag right now. The Oculus Store can't exist in the Google Play Store due to Google's policies on running a competing app store, and having the app live on every Samsung phone would take up a lot of unnecessary space, so this compromise is understandable. Once you actually get into the Oculus environment, the tutorials to familiarize the user with what's happening are perfect. The execution is visually appealing and there's no doubt the user understands how the interface works when the tutorial is over. For a system that isn't dedicated to this experience, the initial set up process for the Gear VR is as good as it can be.