as a kid whether you had a walkman an ipod or an Android smartphone if you had
a pair of headphones and a three and a half millimeter jack you could always
count on things to just work
you know like it's a good jack and nothing has ever made me
appreciate it more than reviewing bluetooth earbuds now it's not that the
galaxy buds are bad they're actually pretty good they feature excellent audio
quality a great fit and near zero latency with samsung devices but there
are some other things about the buds that sour the experience and when we've
had this other almost perfect audio standard for nearly 80
years is pretty good good enough
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now the galaxy buds are not samsung's first foray into the world of true
wireless earbuds their gear icon x
launched back in 2016 and was refreshed again in 2018 they had features like
fitness tracking for active users along
with swipe support for volume control and 4 gigs of on-board storage
unfortunately battery life was not so good and the originals only worked with
samsung devices for the galaxy buds samsung took what
they learned from the iconx and made a more refined product with more universal
appeal in short they dropped the internal
storage added a wireless charging case improved battery life added support for
bluetooth 5.0 and dropped the price to undercut competitors like apple's
airpods and google's pixel buds but that
would all be for naught if they kept that pesky
samsung only limitation fortunately they didn't the galaxy buds
should work with any Android or iOS device
even though they do still work best with samsung ones
more on that later first let's take a look at them samsung
seems to have taken a lot of design cues from the iconx down to the rounded
triangular touch pad and like all decent
earbuds they include three sizes of rubber ear tips and three sizes of wing
tips to make sure that they will stay in your ears this made riley who wrote this
review and his freakishly asymmetrical ears
very happy moving on to the inside we find the
charging contacts and this curious little black dot which is a sensor that
helps the buds detect whether or not they're in your ears and allow them to
automatically power on or go to sleep accordingly
battery life is a strong point with 6 hours of music listening time and 5
hours of talk time but curiously the case only gives you about a third of the
extended battery life compared to apple's case in spite of its similar
size on that subject if samsung would have had to increase the size to get
more battery life into it i'd probably have left it the way that it is too as
it is it slips easily in and out of even very small pockets with an exterior led
indicating the battery level for the case itself and an interior led which
indicates the earbuds level of charge now it comes in white black or yellow
just like the earbuds and if you've got a galaxy s10 it's
kind of awesome being able to plug in your phone turn on wireless powershare
and then charge your earbuds wirelessly it's just it's just one of those things
that makes you go huh nice
something else that's nice is the audio quality samsung is clearly getting their
mileage out of their 2016 acquisition of harman compared to the airpods which to
be clear are fine for most people the galaxy buds can put out a delightful
amount of bass along with full bodied mids and balance treble
of note however is that part of this superior performance is just the fact
that you can customize your galaxy buds to seal correctly in your ear canal
by comparison the air pods don't really fit snug and therefore let in a lot of
ambient sound now with that said there's a clear
safety advantage to being able to hear the world around you fortunately if
you're into that the buds have an ambient sound mode that's similar to the
one that we first saw on the here one from doppler Labs
basically they use their two external microphones to record the noise around
you and pass it through the speakers that are right in your ear holes
overall we found that it didn't interfere too much with music quality
and it was helpful especially in an office environment to know if someone's
yelling your name from across the room now let's move on to the app
it's not available for iOS which blows
but other than that it's pretty cool it's actually got some great features so
you can adjust your eq we liked the dynamic and clear presets best you can
update your firmware without any voodoo magic you just press a button called
update firmware like every other tech product thank you samsung i didn't think
this needed to be a good thing but there you go and this is a really cool one you
can actually both see your bud's battery level and locate them by playing a high
pitched chirping noise it's almost like samsung gives a crap if
you lose them and wants to help you cool
also from in there you can customize some of the buds touch gestures you
cannot change the single tap to pause or play and that's on both sides the double
tap to skip a track or the triple tap to go to the previous track but you can
assign the long press action to activate your voice assistant of choice it even
works with alexa turn volume up or down or turn ambient sound on or off
now each earbuds long press action is independent of the other so you can set
them to do different things that is unless you want to use them for volume
control in which case the right earbud has to be volume up while the left one
is volume down as with the airpods you can turn the volume up down or to a
specific percentage with your voice just watch out though because the buds
themselves still don't have voice activation so if
your phone's mic can't hear you then you'll have to summon cortana manually
with a long press i'm just kidding cortana sucks
now overall our experience with the galaxy buds has been pretty freaking
sweet but there are a few flies in this mostly happy ointment just like the
airpods and apple devices the galaxy buds work best with samsung devices and
while that kind of a phrase can often be taken as
just marketing i mean of course samsung
wants you to buy all the samsung products it's really true here the galaxy
wearable app is pre-installed on samsung phones allowing you to instantly pair by
opening the case while other users of Android phones will need to install the
app and as we mentioned before iphone users can't get it at all so they can't
customize their gestures even and while latency is near zero with a
galaxy s10 it's very noticeable on the pixel 3 and
even more so on the iphone 10r that we used and the thing is while we didn't
experience any glitchiness while listening on the iphone or on the s10
our music tended to glitch out much more frequently on the pixel 3 especially
when walking around with the earbuds in-ears and then the pixel 3 in a front
pocket another big negative and this was
actually true on all devices was the call quality now it's decent in a quiet
environment if i was trying to talk to you guys in our studio here that would
be just fine but if you're outside or in a busy room
pretty much good luck having a coherent conversation
so no matter how advanced bluetooth earbuds get with their gesture controls
and advanced features it's the little issues like this that
always make me kind of long for the simplicity of a headphone jack i mean
don't get me wrong i know that by the time this zipper finally really wears
out i'm gonna have to replace these
i guess i just wish that the technology had matured a little more before we
started you know yanking the three and a half millimeter ports out of our phones
so the community over at drop.com asked for a closed back headphone with
excellent price to performance and they're about to get it with the foxtex
tr xo ebony headphones they're based on a model first developed in the late 80s
with a lightweight magnesium alloy frame ebony wood earcups and breathable
material on the ear pads so you can listen for hours in comfort
they also feature higher flux density audio drivers crisp and detailed sound
signature and a rich bass that doesn't become bloated so check it out at the
link below so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking
out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link down below also down there
is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one by the way and our community forum which is definitely
worth a join these things are like really comfortable by the way
totally forgot i had them in while i was just talking to you guys
it's nice some good buds