I’ve been a big fan of Samsung's Galaxy buds ever since they were released just a
year ago, I even went as far as saying that some iPhone owners should choose buy them
instead of Airpods and I personally used them quite a bit, until the Airpods pro were released
that is..
There were a few glaring issues with the originals and with the Plus’s Samsung has done their
best to fix and improve them while adding some new features, and in this video I’ll
cover every little difference and let you know if you should buy the new ones or the
originals at a discount, or if you should upgrade to the new ones.
The Buds+ were just announced and we have them on order with overnight shipping, so
if you want to see our head to head shootout along with a comparison to the AirPods Pro
and Sony XM3’s hit that subscribe button and enable notifications.
Starting out with the case they look almost identical, in fact you might not notice a
difference but if you look closely, instead of having the inside LED between the printed
left and right we now have some buttons.
Everything else about the case is identical, including the built-in 270 mAH battery.
The buds themselves also have only one visible difference, and that is the addition of a
second external microphone.
Personally I think this is a big deal. One of the biggest downsides of the Galaxy buds
were there really poor microphone quality that couldn’t stand a chance against Airpods
and many other competitors. The mic quality should be a lot better now but we’ll see
as soon as we get them in.
Each earbud is just over 10% heavier than before, but they’re still only 6.3 grams
so you shouldn’t notice a difference. That’s because the batteries in the earbuds themselves
are almost 50% larger, 85mah compared to 58.
The battery life of the buds themselves has gone from an already good 6 hours to a very
very impressive 11 hours which is about 85% better meaning not only did samsung make the
battery larger but also improved efficiency.
This leads to a total time charge of 22 hours for playback, still shy of some competitors
but much better than the original 13 hours.
And that's not the only difference with the batteries, you can now get a full hour of
playback in just 3 min of charging which is class leading, where previously it would take
closer to 10min.
This may not seem like a big deal, but where your buds are dead and you’re sitting there
waiting for them to juice so you can start your workout you’ll definitely appreciate
it.
Before I tell you what I’m most excited about I want to mention a few new additions.
First is the direct access to spotify by using the tough panels on the side of the buds.
This is a really cool addition allowing you to pop them in and start listening no matter
if your phone is in your gym bag, across the room charging, or even just in your pocket
and you simply don’t want to take it out. I hope samsung adds this feature via software
update to the originals.
One thing I wasn’t expecting is multipoint support, meaning you can connect them to multiple
devices at the same time. I can connect to my computer to listen to music and also my
phone to hear notifications when they come up. This will be extremely useful to some
people.
I also want to mention that Samsung just released the app to customize galaxy buds on iOS so
you’ll not be able to have the same features as you would have on Android making these
even more appealing for iPhone users.
The last and biggest difference for me personally is the new dual driver design. Most earbuds
including the Airpods Pro use a single speaker and it's very difficult to make it sound great
when you’re bass, mids, and high frequencies all need to come out of a single driver.
I really liked the bass of the original galaxy buds and the mids were ok but what really
lacked for me was the higher frequencies. With this dual driver design we should be
able to keep that bass but get cleaner mids and get much more clarity in the high frequencies.
There’s a chance that the Buds Plus will beat out the Airpods Pro in terms of sound
quality so make sure you have notifications enabled to see our comparison.
One feature that the buds plus didn’t add which is super popular right now is active
noise cancelation. This is probably for three reasons. The first is battery life. Samsung
clearly focused on improving it and adding ANC would mean lower battery life which they
didn’t want.
The second is audio quality. They would likely need to add more hardware to listen and process
the noise cancelation and if they did that they could have needed to stick to a single
driver meaning lower quality audio or possibly making the earbuds larger like some competitors.
The third is cost. The new Galaxy buds plus cost $20 more than the originals at $149,
where as the AirPods Pro and Sony’s retail for $250. I’m fairly confident that the
buds plus would cost at least $199 is Samsung added active noise cancelation, and the $150
price point is a really good sweet spot.
So should you upgrade from your original Galaxy Buds to the Buds Plus? Personally, if they
were my main earbuds that I used I would say absolutely. Having improved microphones and
much better battery life is great, but the better audio quality would really seal the
deal for me and that's not counting the other improvements.
With that said, not everybody needs those upgrades and the sound quality is still fairly
decent, and if that's you there's no reason to upgrade. If you’re a new buyer the choice
is a bit tougher. You can get the originals for about $100 bucks now on Amazon or even
$70 if you don’t mind refurbished units, which have links to down in the description.
Are the Pluses worth $50 to $80 more? Based on the updates I would say absolutely. You’ll
likely have these for multiple years so I think if you can afford the new ones it’s
worth paying a bit more upfront cost and knowing you have all the updates plus better battery
life which you may not need now but once the battery capacity starts going down after many
charges those extra hours will really come in handy.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments section and if you ordered the Galaxy Buds
plus let me know why you decided to go with them. We have links to the new ones and deals
on the old down in the description if you want to check them out. Click up there to
subscribe if you want to see our full shootout, and right over there we have two great Galaxy
bud videos you can watch right now. This has been Max and I’ll see you in the next video!