Meta Quest 3S Official At $299: Here's When It Releases
Meta has just announced its latest VR headset at its Meta Connect event, the Quest 3S, which takes aim at the budget segment while making a few minor sacrifices. The Quest 3S starts at $299.99, while the Quest 3 headset carries an asking price of $500.
The storage options still start at 128 GB, but only goes up to 256 GB for the Quest 3S, while its predecessor offered double that peak storage capacity. To go with the latest launch, Meta has also dropped the Quest 3's asking price from $649.99 to $499.99 for the 512 GB variant.
The latest from Meta retains the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen2 silicon, paired with 8 GB of RAM. On the design front, the triple vertical pill layout for the sensors on the Quest 3 has been abandoned in favor of a cleaner look that adopts clusters of three round cutouts in each lower corner. The controller layout and the strap design, on the other hand, remain identical.
Meta has watered down a few other aspects as well. You get a lower resolution (1832 x 1920 pixels, same as the Quest 2) display unit that translates to a pixel density of 773 PPI, down from the 2064 x 2208 pixel units serving 1218 PPI. Naturally, the pixel density in VR has dropped from 25PPD on the Quest 3 to 20PPD on the Quest 3S. The field of view has also been downgraded to 96-degrees (horizontal) and 90-degrees (vertical), compared to 110-degrees (horizontal) and 96-degrees (vertical) for the Quest 3 headset.
What else do you get and when you can buy it?
"There's no better mixed reality device on the market at this price," Meta says in its official blog post. Some of the most notable capabilities of the Quest 3S include full-color passthrough view, improved support for apps like YouTube and Meta's own social media platforms, and spatial audio refinements. The company says its latest headset also supports a Travel Mode, allowing you to use the headset while on a plane, and down the road there are plans to optimize it for usage on trains as well.
In its attempt to reduce the asking price, Meta has obviously made some cutbacks, but not in all departments. The Quest 3S comes equipped with the same 4-megapixel passthrough sensing kit with 18 PPD output as the Quest 3, and despite packing a slightly smaller 4,324mAh battery the battery life figures have actually climbed to 2.5 hours on a single charger. Thankfully, the peak refresh rate stays at 120Hz, and hand-tracking is also part of the package.
The company says it has rebuilt Meta Horizon OS for immersive computing, while pushing the in-house Meta AI into the picture as well. For video watching and gaming, Meta has made enhancements to the theater View, while keeping Dolby Atmos audio output in the mix. On the gaming side, all the games that were performance-enhanced for the Quest 3, as well as the exclusives, will run on the Quest 3S, too. Pre-orders kick off today, and shipments begin on October 15 in the US.