The best Meta Quest headstraps have always balanced comfort and longevity, evening out the headset’s weight and adding great features like rechargeable batteries and washable pads.
The BoboVR S3 Pro takes things several steps further by not only improving headset comfort with pads and adjustable components, but it also adds in a fancy fan that’ll keep your head cool for as long as the magnetically detachable, rechargeable battery packs last.
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Comfort meets convenience
Everything about the BoboVR S3 Pro is a masterclass in VR headset comfort engineering. The headstrap comes with ample, removable, and easily washable pads, ensuring sharing your headset isn’t a gross experience.
It also features several adjustable components that fit better thanks to a trademark design philosophy. BoboVR’s headstraps not only slide onto the side arms of the Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S, but they also don’t connect to the top buckle on the headset. That allows the BoboVR S3 Pro to get a better angle than the connector would allow, and it also means the headset can swivel independently of the headstrap itself.
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For me, that’s an important differentiator as competing straps like the AMVR BS1 are locked at a specific axis, and that happens to be too low for comfort on my face. I’ve dealt with this problem on some other headstraps before, and I almost always replace them with something else in no time flat.
The back of the headstrap sports a removable battery dock that magnetically attaches to the battery packs. The base headstrap includes one of these 10,000mAh batteries, which is rated for about 5 extra hours of play time on the Quest. Battery life of the headstrap will be reduced depending on how often you use the built-in fan.
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That built-in fan will keep your forehead cool in a way I haven’t seen with any other headstrap. Fans on headstraps aren’t unique, but this one sports a design that fully envelops my forehead and blows air over it at several adjustable speeds, all easily adjusted via the control wheel on the left side.
That control panel also displays the attached battery pack’s percentage, so you know when your battery is about to run out. Like all other BoboVR headstraps, the battery will beep when attached or detached, so you don’t have to take your headset off to swap out batteries.
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This battery pack can be easily charged either via a USB-C cable or with any of the company’s battery docks. For this review, I used the BoboVR PD100, which ships with the dock and one extra battery. This dock has an easy-to-read display that shows the battery percentage of the docked battery pack and even includes an extra cable to charge more than one battery at a time.
The charger operates at 30W, which means it will take about two hours to fully charge each battery pack. Considering the battery packs last around five hours each, there should never be a scenario where you run into having a dead battery, so long as you’ve got two of them. This battery is required to run the fan, so make sure you’re using the battery with the headstrap if you want the full feature set.
The last thing I want to look at is comfort, and this is an area where the BoboVR S3 Pro particularly excels. It’s great and all to have the fan, battery, and display on the headstrap, but there’s no point in wearing it if it’s uncomfortable.
The AMVR BS1 that I compared it to is generally uncomfortable, in my experience. It sits too low on my face and uses an angle that’s constantly pushing the headset down on my cheeks. The BoboVR S3 Pro’s forehead pad sits much lower on the strap, ensuring that all the weight is situated on this pad instead of my face.
You can see this difference in the image above, and while the angle doesn’t seem like it would make much of a difference, the surprising reality is that it does. Both straps have a secondary hinge in the middle that swivels, allowing you to get a better angle for the pad on the back of your head, and I find that BoboVR’s hinge is much tighter, ensuring it stays at the angle you want.
The one to beat
At the regular price of $89, the BoboVR S3 Pro sits squarely in the premium accessory market and makes no apologies for its price. BoboVR has long been a leader in the premium Meta Quest accessories space, and while the company offers less expensive accessories like the E3 and M3 Pro, people who want the best of the best should opt for the S3 Pro instead.
It’s got more padding, more ways to adjust it to your comfort level, bigger batteries, and that all-important fan that keeps you cool and lens fog away for good. It’s a winner for everything except maybe your budget, but there’s something to be said about equipping your technology in a way that ensures long-term comfort.
Enhance your comfort and your play time with the BoboVR S3 Pro, a premium headstrap from the world’s most popular VR accessories brand.
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