Samsung did their whole Unpacked thing on Wednesday and I watched about twenty minutes of the stream before I got distracted making lunch, which is honestly the correct amount of attention to give a phone launch event at this point. The Note 20 Ultra looks fine. Big screen, big price ($1,299 if you want the good storage), S Pen thats apparently faster now, whatever. I dont even use a stylus. What actually stopped me mid-sandwich was the earbuds.
The Galaxy Buds Live are shaped like kidney beans. Not "bean-inspired," not "ergonomically curved," theyre beans. Samsung calls it an open-fit design, no silicone tips, just this little bronze or black or white pod that sits in the bowl of your ear and doesnt seal anything off. Theyre $169.99, they come out later this month, and they apparently have active noise cancellation, which is the part that made me sit up.
Because heres the thing I dont get: ANC works by the earbud sealing your ear canal and then playing an inverse sound wave to cancel out ambient noise. Thats the whole trick. Its a physics thing, not a software thing. If theres a gap between the earbud and your ear canal — which there is, by design, on an open-fit bud — Im not sure how much of that canceling can actually happen. Maybe Samsungs solved something clever here with the mics and the algorithm, and Ill happily eat my words if reviewers say it works. But my gut says "ANC" on these is going to mean "some noise reduction, mostly on lower frequencies, dont expect silence." Im skeptical and Im saying so now, before the reviews land, so nobody can accuse me of hindsight later.
I will say the case looks nice. Little compact puck, wireless charging, comes in colors that actually have names instead of "Space Gray Pro Max." And Ill admit theres something appealing about not having a foam tip jammed in your ear canal for six hours. Ive had AirPods before (work gave me a pair, I didnt buy them, dont at me) and by hour three my ears are just done. An open design might genuinely be more comfortable for a chunk of people. Im just not sure "comfortable" and "noise canceling" are pulling in the same direction here.
None of this is really about Samsung specifically. Its more that every wireless earbud launch this year has been a slightly different shape of the same basic object, and it takes something genuinely weird-looking to get my attention anymore. AirPods Pro did the stem-and-silicone-tip thing. Everyone else copied it or made their own version. Now Samsung goes the other way entirely and makes something that looks like it belongs in a bowl of trail mix, and I respect that more than I expected to. Design risk, even a small one, is rare in this category. Most companies are terrified of looking weird in a product photo.
Also can we talk about how these Unpacked events keep landing in the first week of August every single year now. Its become a fixture, like the Perseids or back-to-school ads. I dont mind it, I just noticed it this year specifically because I was trying to remember if last years Note event was earlier or later and I genuinely couldnt tell you without looking it up (it was August 7th, 2019, for what its worth, I did look it up).
Anyway. Ill probably end up trying a pair of the Buds Live at some point, mostly out of curiosity about the ANC claim, not because my current earbuds are broken. Theyre not. Theyre a cheap pair of wired ones I bought at a gas station in 2018 and refuse to replace because they still work fine and I am stubborn about not throwing away things that work. If the bean earbuds turn out to actually cancel noise the way they claim, Ill write about it. If they dont, that post basically writes itself too.