before i like samsung wireless headphones. They came in all sorts of magical shapes and sizes, with designs that really seemed to embrace the new frontiers offered by fully portable listening devices. Why on earth the brand changed course and started imitating Apple (badly) for its third generation of wireless headphones, I honestly can’t say.
The new Galaxy Buds3 look (and mostly behave) like a Cybertruck version of the standard AirPods, not like an updated version of the Buds2 that I gave a 9/10 WIRED Recommends badge to a few years ago. They cost more than AirPods, are even less comfortable and sound worse.
What’s particularly puzzling isn’t that Samsung is pandering to Apple’s design, but that it had perfectly excellent headphones to begin with. The Galaxy Buds3 sound worse than their predecessors, perform worse than their predecessors and cost more than their predecessors. They’re not very good at all, even compared to AirPods (which aren’t very good either).
Back in the box
It gets awkward as soon as you start unboxing them: The case is a copy of the rounded rectangular thing you get with the AirPods Pro (8/10, WIRED recommends), but with a clear plastic cover that makes it look and feel cheaper. The case works well, with wireless and USB-C charging, so you can put them on a mat by your door so you don’t forget them when you go out.
The buds themselves look like the AirPods were flown to Austin, Texas, with nearly identical rounded plastic top ear tips that transform into silver triangles as you walk towards the tip of the elephant’s trunk. (They’re also available in white, where they look so much like an Apple product that you’d probably mistake them if you saw someone wearing them.) There’s a bright red accent on the right earcup (and inside the box) to tell you which earpiece it is which is undoubtedly a nice addition to Apple’s gray white nothingness, but otherwise they look like Cybertrucked AirPods in every sense of the word.
Photo: Parker Hall
They’re larger and more cumbersome to fit than standard AirPods, especially thanks to the aforementioned triangular design: Gripping a triangle to adjust the ear tip is significantly more difficult than gripping a rounded cylinder, which makes them fit in and out of the ears you test of dexterity.
The same goes for the controls, which use the same pinch-and-slide controls that the AirPods offer, except the shape of the buds means I’ve always confused the way they sit in my ears when I want to adjust the volume or change songs. What happened to the simple touch controls and shockingly comfortable design of the Buds2?
In motion
The main feature that Samsung is touting about these new headphones is that they have built-in AI, so you can use voice controls to change songs, adjust volume, answer calls, and even do real-time translation . Voice controls work well, but Samsung’s AI-based translation isn’t great; I asked my wife, who speaks fluent Spanish (the most likely language to be used for this here in the United States), to say a few sentences and the app missed all the context and translated poorly. Stick to Google Translate.
The app is also full of all sorts of other useless features. The headphones will, for some reason, remind you if your neck has been twisted for too long. If you’re bent over so long that you get neck pain, I’m not sure a pair of headphones chirping merrily at you is going to solve the problem.
Then there’s active noise cancellation: because the headphones have such a poor seal, it’s like putting an air conditioner next to an open window. Sure, ANC does what it can to cancel out outside noise, but without a physical barrier (like ear tips) to isolate the world (or put it through some kind of ventilation, like Apple does with AirPods Pro and Samsung did with -the old Galaxy Buds), its capabilities are limited. All this to say: you won’t get silence wearing these headphones, even with the ANC turned up and your music playing along with it.
