HTC Vive Consumer Edition will cost $799, comes with Vive Phone Services

HTC has finally unveiled the retail version of the Vive VR headset. The gadget has been co-developed with Valve and has received a last-minute addition, which should give it an edge over the competition.

HTC Vive Consumer Edition features the design of the Vive Pre - the unit we saw on CES, which comes with an updated headstrap, a camera, doubles the controller's battery life, and has a refreshed branding. It also features a new Phone Services (that’s short for a built-in phone), which will allow you to stay in the virtual reality and not lose touch with the real one.

The rest of the key features of the Vive include an OLED 2160 x 1200px display, a front-facing camera to help you see the real world, two wireless controllers with haptic feedback, room scale movement sensors.

The HTC Vive supports SteamVR, of course, and will ship with two full-featured titles:

• Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives, by Owlchemy Labs: In a firmly tongue-in-cheek world where robots have replaced all human jobs, step into the ‘Job Simulator’ to learn what it was like 'to job'.
• Fantastic Contraption, by Northway Games in collaboration with Radial Games: Imagine walking around a grassy island floating in the sky, building a machine the size of a horse with your own hands, and then watching it roll out into the world.

And these are the recommended PC specs for the HTV Vive:

• GPU: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 970, AMD Radeon™ R9 290 equivalent or better
• CPU: Intel® i5-4590 / AMD FX 8350 equivalent or better
• RAM: 4 GB or more
• Video Output: HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort 1.2 or newer
• USB Port: 1x USB 2.0 or better port
• Operating System: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1 or later, Windows 10

HTC Vive Consumer Edition is priced at $799 and will go on pre-order on February 29. The first batch of VR headsets will be shipped in early April. Meanwhile you can check our hands-on right here.