More than five years after introducing the first-generation Galaxy Buds, Samsung has finally launched the third iteration of the earbuds, the Galaxy Buds 3. These arrived alongside the more advanced Galaxy Buds 3 Pro at the 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 significant improvements over the old ones in terms of design, ruggedness, durability, connectivity, audio quality, call quality, battery life, and advanced features. Let’s take a closer look at all these improvements.
New design and better durability
The Galaxy Buds 3 feature a very different design for both the earbuds as well as the charging case compared to the Galaxy Buds 2.
Starting with the earbuds, the Galaxy Buds 3 have a stem design, similar to Apple’s AirPods. This design offers several advantages.
First, the Galaxy Buds 3 don’t stick out as much from your ears as the Galaxy Buds 2, which makes them more attractive. Second, they’re more comfortable and secure in your ear. Third, the stem design brings the microphones closer to your lips, providing better call quality, something we’ll cover in more detail later.
Samsung has also made the Galaxy Buds 3 more rugged and durable compared to the Galaxy Buds 2. While the older earbuds feature an IP52 rating for water and dust resistance, the new ones come with an IP57 rating.
Thanks to this, the Galaxy Buds 3 are more resistant to water, rain, sweat, and dust than the Galaxy Buds 2. This also makes Samsung’s earbuds better in terms of durability than most other earbuds on the market, including Apple’s 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 cover, allowing you to 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 come up with better cases for the Galaxy Buds 3.
Pairing button
The Galaxy Buds 3 charging case has a pairing button, which is missing from the Galaxy Buds 2. This button lets you quickly pair the earbuds with a new device. Here’s how it works:
If your Galaxy Buds 3 are already paired with one 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 it into pairing mode. Once this happens, the Galaxy Buds 3 can be detected on the device you want to pair these earbuds with.
Better audio quality
While the Galaxy Buds 2 feature a dual-driver design, the Galaxy Buds 3 feature a single-driver audio setup.
This might immediately make you think that the Galaxy Buds 3 don’t sound as good as the Galaxy Buds 2. However, that’s not necessarily the case. There are plenty of earbuds with a single speaker that sound better than those with two or more speakers. We can only say how the Galaxy Buds 3 sound after testing them thoroughly.
When it comes to connectivity, the Galaxy Buds 2 came with Bluetooth 5.2. The Galaxy Buds 3, on the other hand, comes with Bluetooth 5.4. The newer version of Bluetooth offers a more stable and secure connection than the older one. This means that you should experience fewer connection drops on the Galaxy Buds 3 than on the Galaxy Buds 2.
In addition to a new 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. Both new audio codecs offer a 24-bit/96kHz sampling rate, which allows for higher quality audio to be transmitted from Galaxy devices to the earbuds, which should result in much better audio quality.
Better call quality
As mentioned earlier, the microphones on the Galaxy Buds 3 are closer to your lips than those on the Galaxy Buds 2, providing better audio recording 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 record audio with a much wider bandwidth than the microphones on the Galaxy Buds 2. Wider bandwidth equals better audio quality.
This means that with this technology, the Galaxy Buds 3 will be able to capture your voice much better and transmit it to the person on the other end of the call, allowing them to hear you with the utmost clarity.
Despite these improvements, the Galaxy Buds 3 might not be able to properly record parts of your voice if you speak too quietly or if there is too much background noise. Well, the Galaxy Buds 3 will use Galaxy AI to reconstruct the lost parts of your voice so the other person can clearly hear what you are saying. There is another Galaxy AI feature on board the Galaxy Buds 3 that we will talk about in a moment.
Longer battery life
The Galaxy Buds 3 charging case is equipped with a 515mAh battery, which is 9% more than the battery in the Galaxy Buds 2 charging case.
With this improvement, total audio playback time has increased by four hours with ANC on and one hour with ANC off, and total talk time has increased by five hours with ANC on and six hours with ANC off.
These are impressive numbers. You can check the battery life of the new headphones in the image below.
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It’s worth noting that the Galaxy Buds 3 have a smaller battery than the Galaxy Buds 2 (48mAh vs. 61mAh). Fortunately, this didn’t affect the earbuds’ battery life figures, as you can see in the image above.
Galaxy AI for real-time language translation
With Galaxy AI on the Galaxy Buds 3, you will be able to hear what the other person is saying in their language on your earbuds in your language in real-time, a very useful feature that is not present on the Galaxy Buds 2.
To use this feature, place your Galaxy Buds 3 in your ear, open Interpreter on your Galaxy Z Fold 6 or Galaxy Z Flip 6, select the listening mode, and you’re ready to go. We hope Samsung will extend this feature to older Galaxy smartphones and tablets with an update to Interpreter.
With all these features, the Galaxy Buds 3 are vastly better than the Galaxy Buds 2. If you think these features are worth the upgrade and are considering buying one, you can check out the prices and release dates of the latest earbuds in this article or click the link below to pre-order them.