 As a kid, whether you had a Walkman, an iPod, or an Android smartphone, if you had a pair of headphones and a 3.5mm jack, you could always count on things to just... work. You know, like, it's a good jack. And nothing has ever made me appreciate it more than reviewing Bluetooth earbuds. Now, it's not that the Galaxy Buds are bad. They're actually pretty good. They feature excellent audio quality, a great fit, and near zero latency. With Samsung devices. But there are some other things about the Buds that sour the experience. And when we've had this other, almost perfect audio standard for nearly 80 years, is pretty good good enough? You know what else is pretty good? Our sponsor, Madrinas. Madrinas Coffee blends specialty cold brew coffees into 15-ounce grab-and-go cans for everyone's convenience. Check them out and use offer code LINUS to save 40% at the link in the video description. 🎵 Now, the Galaxy Buds are not Samsung's first foray into the world of true wireless earbuds. Their Gear Icon X launched back in 2016 and was refreshed again in 2018. They had features like fitness tracking for active users, along with swipe support for volume control and four gigs of onboard storage. Unfortunately, battery life was not so good and the originals only worked with Samsung devices. For the Galaxy Buds, Samsung took what they learned from the Icon X and made a more refined product with more universal appeal. In short, they dropped the internal storage, added a wireless charging case, improved battery life, added support for Bluetooth 5.0, and dropped the price to undercut competitors like Apple's AirPods and Google's Pixel Buds. But that would all be for naught if they kept that pesky Samsung-only limitation. Fortunately, they didn't. The Galaxy Buds should work with any Android or iOS device, even though they do still work best with Samsung ones. More on that later. First, let's take a look at them. Samsung seems to have taken a lot of design cues from the Icon X down to the rounded triangular touchpad. And, like all decent earbuds, they include three sizes of rubber ear tips and three sizes of wing tips to make sure that they will stay in your ears. This made Riley, who wrote this review, and his freakishly asymmetrical ears, very happy. Moving on to the inside, we find the charging contacts and this curious little black dot, which is a sensor that helps the buds detect whether or not they're in your ears and allow them to automatically power on or go to sleep accordingly. Battery life is a strong point with six hours of music listening time and five hours of talk time, but curiously, the case only gives you about a third of the extended battery life compared to Apple's case, in spite of its similar size. On that subject, if Samsung would have had to increase the size to get more battery life into it, I'd probably have left it the way that it is, too. As it is, it slips easily in and out of even very small pockets, with an exterior LED indicating the battery level for the case itself and an interior LED, which indicates the earbuds' level of charge. Now, it comes in white, black, or yellow, just like the earbuds, and, if you've got a Galaxy S10, it's kinda awesome being able to plug in your phone, turn on wireless power share, and then charge your earbuds wirelessly. It's just one of those things that makes you go, huh, nice. Something else that's nice is the audio quality. Samsung is clearly getting their mileage out of their 2016 acquisition of Harman. Compared to the AirPods, which, to be clear, are fine for most people, the Galaxy Buds can put out a delightful amount of bass, along with full-bodied mids and balanced treble. Of note, however, is that part of this superior performance is just the fact that you can customize your Galaxy Buds to seal correctly in your ear canal. By comparison, the AirPods don't really fit snug, and therefore, let in a lot of ambient sound. Now, with that said, there's a clear safety advantage to being able to hear the world around you. Fortunately, if you're into that, the Buds have an ambient sound mode that's similar to the one that we first saw on the Hear One from Doppler Labs. Basically, they use their two external microphones to record the noise around you and pass it through the speakers that are right in your ear holes. Overall, we found that it didn't interfere too much with music quality, and it was helpful, especially in an office environment, to know if someone's yelling your name from across the room. Now let's move on to the app. It's not available for iOS, which blows. But other than that, it's pretty cool. It's actually got some great features. So you can adjust your EQ. We liked the dynamic and clear presets best. You can update your firmware without any voodoo magic. You just press a button called update firmware, like every other tech product. Thank you, Samsung. I didn't think this needed to be a good thing, but there you go. And this is a really cool one. You can actually both see your Buds battery level and locate them by playing a high-pitched chirping noise. It's almost like Samsung gives a crap if you lose them and wants to help you. Cool. Also from in there, you can customize some of the Buds touch gestures. You cannot change the single tap to pause or play, and that's on both sides, the double tap to skip a track, or the triple tap to go to the previous track, but you can assign the long press action to activate your voice assistant of choice. It even works with Alexa. Turn volume up or down, or turn ambient sound on or off. Now each ear buds long press action is independent of the other, so you can set them to do different things. That is, unless you want to use them for volume control, in which case the right earbud has to be volume up while the left one is volume down. As with the AirPods, you can turn the volume up, down, or to a specific percentage with your voice. Just watch out though, because the Buds themselves still don't have voice activation. So if your phone's mic can't hear you, then you'll have to summon Cortana manually with a long press. I'm just kidding, Cortana sucks. Now overall, our experience with the Galaxy Buds has been pretty freaking sweet, but there are a few flies in this mostly happy ointment. Just like the AirPods and Apple devices, the Galaxy Buds work best with Samsung devices. And while that kind of a phrase can often be taken as just marketing, I mean, of course, Samsung wants you to buy all the Samsung products, it's really true here. The Galaxy Wearable app is pre-installed on Samsung phones, allowing you to instantly pair by opening the case, while other users of Android phones will need to install the app. And as we mentioned before, iPhone users can't get it at all, so they can't customize their gestures even. And while latency is near zero with a Galaxy S10, it's very noticeable on the Pixel 3 and even more so on the iPhone XR that we used. And the thing is, while we didn't experience any glitchiness while listening on the iPhone or on the S10, our music tended to glitch out much more frequently on the Pixel 3, especially when walking around with the earbuds in ears and then the Pixel 3 in a front pocket. Another big negative, and this was actually true on all devices, was the call quality. Now it's decent in a quiet environment. If I was trying to talk to you guys in our studio here, that would be just fine. But if you're outside or in a busy room, pretty much good luck having a coherent conversation. So no matter how advanced Bluetooth earbuds get with their gesture controls and advanced features, it's the little issues like this that always make me kind of long for the simplicity of a headphone jack. I mean, don't get me wrong. I know that by the time this zipper finally really wears out, I'm gonna have to replace these. I guess I just wish that the technology had matured a little more before we started, you know, yanking the three and a half millimeter ports out of our phones. So the community over at drop.com asked for a closed back headphone with excellent price to performance. And they're about to get it with the Fox Tech's TRX00 ebony headphones. They're based on a model first developed in the late 80s with a lightweight magnesium alloy frame, ebony wood ear cups and breathable material on the ear pads so you can listen for hours in comfort. They also feature higher flux density audio drivers, crisp and detailed sound signature and a rich bass that doesn't become bloated. So check it out at the link below. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link down below. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, by the way, and our community forum, which is definitely worth a join. These things are like really comfortable, by the way. Totally forgot I had them in while I was just talking to you guys. It's nice. Some good buds.