Samsung Galaxy S10: What about the Gear VR?

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.

Whether you're using the 5.8-inch 2280x1080 resolution display on the Galaxy S10e or the 6.4-inch 3040x1440 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!

Russell Holly

Russell is a Contributing Editor at Android Central. He's a former server admin who has been using Android since the HTC G1, and quite literally wrote the book on Android tablets. You can usually find him chasing the next tech trend, much to the pain of his wallet. Find him on Facebook and Twitter

4 Comments
  • While you can fit a Note9 in to an SM-R325 model GearVR with the default adapter that comes with the headset, I'd recommend contacting Samsung (I used the live chat through the pre-installed Samsung Members app) and getting the new Note9 adapter for it. Samsung sent it out to me free (in UK) after I provided my GearVR serial number, and it now fits in a lot better. I'm not sure if this new adapter is also recommended for any of the S10 range though.
  • What about the Google Daydream? Previous models have supported it (S8 and above), so I am crossing fingers. :)
  • When the Oculus Go exists, the GearVR doesn't seem that great anymore. There's a reason Samsung stopped talking about VR.
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