More than five years after the introduction of the first-generation Galaxy Buds, Samsung has finally launched the third iteration of the earbuds: the Galaxy Buds 3. They were launched alongside the more advanced Galaxy Buds 3 Pro during the company’s Galaxy Unpacked event, where the company also launched a bunch of other products.
The Galaxy Buds 3 are the direct successors to the Galaxy Buds 2. The new earbuds bring huge improvements over the old ones in terms of design, sturdiness, durability, connectivity, audio quality, call quality, battery life, and advanced features. Let’s take a closer look at all those improvements.
New design and improved durability
The Galaxy Buds 3 have a very different design for the earbuds and charging case than the Galaxy Buds 2.
Starting with the earbuds, the Galaxy Buds 3 have a stem design, similar to the Apple AirPods. This design offers several advantages.
First, the Galaxy Buds 3 don’t stick out of your ears as far as the Galaxy Buds 2, which makes them look more attractive. Second, they sit more comfortably and securely in your ear. Third, the stem design brings the microphones closer to your lips, which makes for better call quality, something we’ll talk more about later.
Samsung has also made the Galaxy Buds 3 more rugged and durable compared to the Galaxy Buds 2. While the older earbuds have an IP52 rating for water and dust resistance, the new ones have an IP57 rating.
This makes the Galaxy Buds 3 more resistant to water, rain, sweat and dust than the Galaxy Buds 2. This also makes Samsung’s earbuds more durable than most other earbuds on the market, including the Apple AirPods with an IP54 rating.
As for the charging case, it has a vertical design as opposed to the horizontal design of the Galaxy Buds 2. This takes up much less space on your desk. The charging case also has a transparent lid, so you can check which earbuds are in the case and which are not, reducing the chances of losing them. The vertical design should also allow case makers to offer better cases for the Galaxy Buds 3.
Clutch button
The Galaxy Buds 3 charging case has a pairing button, something that isn’t present on the Galaxy Buds 2. This button allows you to quickly pair the earbuds with a new device. Here’s how it works:
If your Galaxy Buds 3 are already paired to a device but you now want to pair them with a new device, simply press and hold the pairing button on the charging case for a few seconds to put them into pairing mode. Once that happens, your Galaxy Buds 3 will become discoverable on the device you want to pair them with.
Better audio quality
While the Galaxy Buds 2 have a dual-driver design, the Galaxy Buds 3 have a single-driver audio setup.
That might immediately make you think that the Galaxy Buds 3 might not sound as good as the Galaxy Buds 2. That’s not necessarily the case, though. There are plenty of single-driver earbuds that sound better than those with two or more drivers. We can’t say how the Galaxy Buds 3 sounds until we’ve tested them thoroughly.
In terms of connectivity, the Galaxy Buds 2 featured Bluetooth 5.2. The Galaxy Buds 3, on the other hand, features Bluetooth 5.4. The newer version of Bluetooth offers a more stable and secure connection compared to the older version. This means that you should experience fewer connection dropouts on the Galaxy Buds 3 than you would on the Galaxy Buds 2.
In addition to a newer version of Bluetooth, the Galaxy Buds 3 also feature SSC HiFi and SSC UHQ audio codecs. In comparison, the Galaxy Buds 2 only feature SSC. SSC stands for Samsung Scalable Codec and UHQ stands for Ultra High Quality. The two new audio codecs offer a 24bit/96KHz sampling rate, allowing for higher quality audio transmission from Galaxy devices to the earbuds, which should result in much better audio quality.
Better call quality
As mentioned, the microphones on the Galaxy Buds 3 sit closer to your lips than those on the Galaxy Buds 2, which allows for better audio pickup and therefore better call quality. However, the latest earbuds come with two new features to improve call quality even further.
The microphones on the Galaxy Buds 3 feature Super Wideband (SWB) technology. This allows the microphones to capture audio with a much wider bandwidth than the Galaxy Buds 2 microphones. Greater bandwidth equals better audio quality.
Thanks to this technology, the Galaxy Buds 3 can pick up your voice much better and transmit it to the person you are talking to. This allows them to understand you optimally.
Despite these improvements, the Galaxy Buds 3 might not be able to properly pick up bits of your voice if you’re speaking too softly or there’s too much background noise. Well, the Galaxy Buds 3 uses Galaxy AI to reconstruct lost bits of your voice so the other person can clearly hear what you’re saying. There’s one more Galaxy AI feature on board the Galaxy Buds 3 that we’ll get to in a moment.
Longer battery life
The Galaxy Buds 3 charging case has a 515mAh battery, which is 9% larger than the battery in the Galaxy Buds 2 charging case.
This improvement increases total audio playback time by four hours with ANC on and one hour with ANC off. Total talk time increases by five hours with ANC on and six hours with ANC off.
Those are some astonishing numbers. You can check out the battery life of the new earbuds in the image below.
The story continues after the video…
It’s worth noting that the Galaxy Buds 3 have a smaller battery compared to the Galaxy Buds 2 (48mAh vs 61mAh). Thankfully, that didn’t impact the earbuds’ battery life, as you can see in the image above.
Galaxy AI for Real-Time Language Translation
With Galaxy AI on Galaxy Buds 3, you can hear what the other person is saying in your language in real time through your earbuds, in your language. This is a useful feature that isn’t present on Galaxy Buds 2.
To use this feature, simply put your Galaxy Buds 3 in your ear, open Interpreter on your Galaxy Z Fold 6 or Galaxy Z Flip 6 and select Listening Mode, and you’re good to go. We hope Samsung expands this feature to older Galaxy smartphones and tablets with an update to Interpreter.
With all these features, the Galaxy Buds 3 are a massive improvement over the Galaxy Buds 2. If you think these features are worth the upgrade and are thinking of buying a pair, you can check out the pricing and release dates of the latest earbuds in this article or click on the link below to pre-order them.