Meta Quest 3S
A Quest 2, but better. Or a Quest 3, but worse
THE FIRST TIME I put the Quest 3S on my head, I was met with a familiar sight. "This is quite a lot like the Quest 2," I thought. My opinion hasn't changed since I've got more familiar with Meta's latest VR headset. Neither should it. It turns out that the Quest 3S and Quest 2 are practically the same when it comes to optics, but the new 3S does a few things a lot better than the Quest 2.
The Quest 3S comes in two storage sizes: 128GB and 256GB, yours for $299 or $399 respectively. The larger capacity suits a decent library of games on the device itself, and thus use as a standalone headset. Anyway, the big change is the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor. This is the same processor found in the top-spec Quest 3—the 3S and S even share the same 8GB of RAM—and as a result, the Quest 3S has a lot more grunt than the older Quest 2.