I guess I'm just going to read about this stuff for a while. It looks cool, but not cool enough to buy a new phone.

Yeah, if you don't have the cash or you're not developing for it, you've got some time. This stuff is still going to be sorting itself out for a few more years. But, that being said, I've noticed the adoption model is being kicked into high gear. With things like kickstarters and inexpensive overseas mass manufacturing making everything cheaper, the thresholds in number of people that need to be reached in order to pull in minimum adopters are massively shrinking the adoption timeframe. Things are happening very fast, and barring mega catastrophe, it's only going to speed up. If you haven't watched that video of the MIT lab i posted yesterday definitely check it out. They're working with early replicator tech that is just going fuck everybody up as soon as someone figures out how to pirate their tech for cheap. Brave new fucking world.

Surely you can do developing and testing on a virtual phone running on a tablet or pc?

You gotta be able to test it though. VR/AR is a new way of consuming info. It's requiring different ways of looking at how we interface. A lot of it is tweaking for feel. Like today I'm working in my 3d drawing app and accidentally made an explosion happen in front of my face. Clearly that's a bug. :D

Call it a feature.

Yeah, it's not a very enjoyable feature. ;)