It's been just over two years now since soon-to-depart CTO John Carmack told a Meta Connect audience about his vision for a super low-end VR headset that came in at $250 and 250 grams. "We're not building that headset today, but I keep trying," Carmack said at the time with some exasperation.

As part of our initial Quest 3S testing, we checked how long the Quest 3S will last. Thankfully, it appears Meta was honest when it gave its battery life estimate.

The Quest 3S was expected by many to simply be a budget version of the Quest 3, but it appears what Meta has done instead is co-opt in a bunch of (perfectly decent) components from the Meta Quest 2—in combination with a dash of the improvements from the Quest 3—to make a VR headset that sits somewhere between the two.

The first hint of that is the headset’s Fresnel lenses, which iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari writes in a blog post are “100% compatible” with those used by the Quest 2. The headset has the older headset’s IPD adjustment mechanism, as well; and it shares the same single LCD panel, rather than using one panel per eye, like the Meta Quest 3.

It’s fair to say, then, that thanks to the newly-released Meta Quest 3S – coming in hot with the same amount of storage space wrapped neatly in a baseline $299.99 price – mixed-reality gaming is finally approachable to everyone who might have been in the market to upgrade from the Quest 2.

The Meta Quest 3S also relies on the Quest 2’s fresnel lens system instead of the pancake lenses used by the Quest 3. I won’t get into the weeds of how these lenses differ technically, but know that fresnel lenses are bulkier and cause blurriness at the fringes of your field of view.

It's by far the best value in VR. But the question is, should you upgrade to it or go with Meta's even better model?

I reviewed Meta's Quest 3S, a budget VR headset with mixed reality and AI, to test its quality and value as an upgrade or a first headset.

"There are a lot of broken Quest 2's out there and it's great to be able to salvage components to fix the latest iteration of the hardware."

The Meta Quest 3S has some of the best features of the Meta Quest 3, for $200 less. You’ll just need to accept the limited memory and lenses.