I bought the Meta Quest 3 in June of last year using some crypto currency I did not want to hold onto. Over the last few months I have not really used it. That’s mostly because the best parts of the Meta Quest 3 are the games. However, I’ve been playing Black Ops 6 (desktop game) since October! I’ve played no other game and I’m not bored of it (yet?).

The Good

YouTube

This is so fucking cool. Google really set the bar high for media apps. They really made great use of VR with some special effects. The app’s queue experience could be a bit better as I found it annoying to navigate.

The Bad

Things that are not permanently not going to change or are not expected to change any time soon due to requiring 3rd party developers.

Battery Life

Shitty battery life makes it only good for less than 2 hours. This makes sense if you want to limit how much you game on the Meta Quest 3. I’ll play the game it came with and next time I’m socially bored, I’ll boot up VR Chat.

Passthrough Quality

Could be way better. It’s not possible to use a screen like your laptop without mixed reality, which is a pain to start sometimes FYI.

Watching Movies in Bed

I tried to watch Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory in my bed when I was living in my dorm at Waterloo. My chair isn’t the most comfortable so I opted for my bed. I laid by head on the pillow and it was a pain to setup the video app in the dimension I wanted. The worst part was the low battery notification that came up which required me to watch the movie with the USB cable plugged in.

Short USB Cable

Poor battery life combined with short-cable equals not just a money grab for long cables, but holy crap, I hated using the Quest while plugged in. Chromecast + TV is way better. I can eat popcorn with ease, go to the washroom with ease, and multi-task easily.

Productivity Apps

No email client or recommend client. It really seems that Meta wants to push entertainment as a service. This is good for people who are not wired, but I’m a wired person (or at least I’m trying to be).

Multi-tasking is actually not possible regardless of multi-app support. It’s such a consumption-oriented device, it makes me feel a bit uneasy.

AI could probably make this better via some next level VR agent management UI.

Android App Support

So fucking annoying to do without some bullshit tutorial on installing another software for proxying or something.

Money Grabs Everywhere

Yeah this entire ecosystem is built for the well off. The entry price itself is $500+, then each game is $25+ and for what? Short-term fun essentially. Some apps are trying to make using Quest a hobby, but I’m of the opinion that people should find more hobbies and communities in the real world where real face to face connections can be made.

The Ugly

The ugly is things that can be improved with effort by Meta

Inability to Parse Passwords CSV file from Firefox

What prompted me to write this article is when I tried to log into the Sportsnet+ and had to enter my password. I generated my password using Firefox, so when I tried to import the CSV file Firefox allows you to export, Meta’s browser doesn’t fucking let you in! on the Quest 3 and had to enter a password, which is either saved in Firefox or KeepassXC, neither of which are supported by Quest OS. You’d think Big Tech would be good at making software but nope. Meta’s Quest browser is dogshit.

Hard to use a VPN

It’s a bit much to ask Meta to support VPNs as they are the antithesis of privacy, however, it’s weird when I use a VPN 24/7 on my phone but not on another Android device. It’s just weird that Meta doesn’t support VPNs natively.

Mixed Reality

I have a 2 monitor setup when I use my computer. I intentionally keep my laptop’s display off because it’s smaller and also would use the GPU which would hurt gaming performance. So when I used Meta’s remote desktop feature for the first time, it was cool for a bit. Using Steam VR is better in my opinion as Meta Question is definitely not as productive as physically being able to make use of more than one monitor.

When you add extra displays in Meta Quest, the problem is that these displays are so gigantic that you have to tilt your head a lot just to properly use the other displays!

Boundaries

This popup will come out of nowhere and waste 60 seconds of your time

Movies

It’s such a shit experience watching a movie