2018 was the year of wireless headsets or ‘buds’ as people like to call them now. Apple released their Airpods way back in 2016 but they gained popularity in India recently. The Pixel buds which were released with the 2nd generation of the Pixel phones sounded great and had a lot of features but did not get much attention in the market. Now, Samsung has boarded this train of cordless earphones with their new Galaxy Buds which were announced during the launch of the new Galaxy S10 line up of phones.
The Galaxy Buds come with a 6-hour battery life and an additional 7-hour rechargeable battery of their battery case. This tiny battery case also supports wireless charging so if you have a Galaxy S10, you can charge your buds off of the back of your phone. Samsung will sell them in three colours black, white and yellow, and the price will be $129, you can see that Samsung is again doing things the Non-Apple way. Pre-orders for these headsets have already started with the S10 phones.
Coming to the features, the Buds come with intuitive touch controls that can be customised inside the Samsung Wear app which allows you to choose what each earbud’s touchpad should do. The app also has an equaliser built in that you can use to customise the sound according to your musical taste. They have soft silicone ear tips which sit in your ears and seal them, you can wear them for hours and not feel a thing because of their light-weight design.
The most interesting thing about these buds is the microphones inside them, there’s two of them in each bud. The earphones adapt to the surrounding noises which means that if the ambient noise is louder, then the mic near the inside of the earpiece is used and if the environment is quieter then the mic on the outside is activated. This results in very clear voice transmission. The mics also filter the human voices so that you can hear the people near you, Samsung calls this mode the ‘Ambient Sound Mode’.
The Buds also have an IPX2 rating which means that they are resistant of any sweat or dripping water. This is not as good as the IP56 rated wireless headphones that Jabra offers but for a price $70 less than them, it’s a pretty sweet deal. They are still better than the Apple Airpods which have no water resistance whatsoever.
The earphones have full Bixby support which is the virtual assistant from Samsung and we can’t say for sure if they will support google assistant later. All things kept in perspective, they might be the best wireless earphones you can get for $129 as of now.
