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Image courtesy HTC

Vive Cosmos is the Lowest Rated HTC Headset on Amazon by Far

    Categories: HTC Vive CosmosNewsVR Headset

Though HTC touts Vive Cosmos as its best PC VR headset yet, the headset is getting tanked so far in online customer reviews, making it far and away the lowest rated HTC headset by that metric yet.

While Oculus also ran into some less than stellar customer reviews when it launched the Rift S earlier this year, making it the lowest rated Oculus headset on Amazon at 3.7 of 5 stars, Vive Cosmos is truly taking a beating by comparison.

While HTC has set up Amazon to combine all of its headsets into a single product listing, with each headset as a separate ‘style’ (which lumps reviews together), we can sort customers reviews for only those submitted for the Vive Cosmos ‘style’.

Looking at ‘verified purchaser’ customer reviews for Vive Cosmos only, we find just 17 reviews so far, with an average rating of 2.1 of 5 stars. That’s compared to an average score of 3.8 of 5 stars based on reviews of the entire Vive PC lineup (which also includes the original Vive, Vive Pro, and Vive Pro Eye.

Over at Best Buy we only see four ‘verified purchaser’ reviews for Cosmos, all of which are 1 of 5 stars.

This is only a small sample size at this point, and to what extent Amazon reviews are truly representative of a product’s desirability or value is surely up for debate (fake reviews notwithstanding). But at a minimum we could surmise that it functions as a ‘first impression’ for potential buyers of the world’s leading online storefront, which makes it an important metric no matter how you slice it.

Looking through the Amazon reviews for Vive Cosmos, some common themes emerge. Tracking (specifically relating to light sensitivity), ergonomics, a small sweet spot, and controllers were all commonly cited as downsides, while a handful of reviewers said the headset’s $700 price was too high. On the plus side, some reviews mentioned that Cosmos offers good visual quality (as long as you’re within the sweet spot) and some found the halo-style head-mount to be comfortable.

This mirrors much of what we found in our own Cosmos review, as well as the common complaints that HTC addressed shortly after the headset launched.