Galaxy Buds 3 vs. Galaxy Buds 2: What’s changed?

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 launched a bunch of other products as well.

The Galaxy Buds 3 are direct successors to the Galaxy Buds 2. The new earbuds bring massive improvements over the old ones in terms of design, ruggedness, durability, connectivity, audio quality, call quality, battery life, and advanced features. Let’s check out all those improvements in detail.

New design and better durability

The Galaxy Buds 3 feature a vastly different design for 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 the Apple AirPods. This design offers several benefits.

First, the Galaxy Buds 3 don’t pop out from your ears as much as the Galaxy Buds 2, which makes them look more appealing. Second, they feel more comfortable and secure in the ear. Third, the stem design brings microphones closer to your lips, offering a better call quality, which is something we will discuss 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.

With that, 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 in the market, including the Apple 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 lid, allowing you to check which earbud is present in the case and which isn’t, reducing the chances of you losing them. The vertical design should also allow case makers to offer better cases for the Galaxy Buds 3.

Pairing button

The charging case of the Galaxy Buds 3 features a pairing button, which is something that isn’t present on the Galaxy Buds 2. This button allows you to quickly pair the earbuds with a new device. Here’s how it works:

If your Galaxy Buds 3 are already paired with a device but now you want to pair it with a new device, simply press and hold the pairing button on the charging case for a few seconds to put it in the pairing mode. Once that happens, the Galaxy Buds 3 can be discovered 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.

That might immediately make you think that the Galaxy Buds 3 might not sound as good as the Galaxy Buds 2. However, that isn’t necessarily the case. There are many earphones with a single driver that sound better than the ones with two or more drivers. We can say how the Galaxy Buds 3 sounds only after thoroughly testing it.

Coming to connectivity, the Galaxy Buds 2 featured Bluetooth 5.2. The Galaxy Buds 3, on the other hand, feature Bluetooth 5.4. The newer version of Bluetooth offers a more stable and secure connection compared to the older one. That means you should experience fewer connection dropouts on the Galaxy Buds 3 than on the Galaxy Buds 2.

Along with a newer version of Bluetooth, the Galaxy Buds 3 also feature SSC HiFi and SSC UHQ audio codecs. In comparison, the Galaxy Buds 2 feature only SSC. SSC stands for Samsung Scalable Codec and UHQ stands for Ultra High Quality. The two new audio codecs offer a 24bit/96KHz sampling rate, enabling transmission of higher quality audio from Galaxy devices to the earbuds, which should result in a 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, offering 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 the Super Wideband (SWB) technology. It allows microphones to record audio with a much wider bandwidth than the Galaxy Buds 2 microphones. Wider bandwidth equals better audio quality.

It means that with this technology, Galaxy Buds 3 will be able to capture your voice much better and transmit the same to the person on the other end of the call, allowing them to hear you with utmost clarity.

Despite these improvements, the Galaxy Buds 3 might not be able to record bits of your voice properly if you speak too softly or if there’s too much noise in the background. Well, the Galaxy Buds 3 will use Galaxy AI to reconstruct lost bits of your voice so that the other person can hear what you say clearly. There’s another Galaxy AI feature onboard the Galaxy Buds 3 which we will discuss in a moment.

Longer battery life

The charging case of the Galaxy Buds 3 features a 515mAh battery. That’s 9% larger than the battery in the charging case on the Galaxy Buds 2.

With this improvement, the total audio playback time has increased by four hours with ANC turned on and one hour with ANC turned off, and the total talk time has increased by five hours with ANC turned on and six hours with ANC turned off.

Those are some amazing numbers. You can check out the battery backup of the new earbuds in the image below.

The story continues after the video…

It is worth mentioning that the Galaxy Buds 3 feature a smaller battery compared to the Galaxy Buds 2 (48mAh versus 61mAh). Fortunately, that hasn’t affected the battery backup figures of the earbuds as you can see in the image above.

Galaxy AI for real-time language translation

With Galaxy AI on 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’s not present on the Galaxy Buds 2.

To use this feature, pop your Galaxy Buds 3 in your ear, open Interpreter on your Galaxy Z Fold 6 or Galaxy Z Flip 6, and select the Listening Mode, and you are good to go. We hope that Samsung expands this feature to older Galaxy smartphones and tablets with an update to Interpreter.

With all these features, the Galaxy Buds 3 are massively better than the Galaxy Buds 2. If you think that these features are worth the upgrade and if you are thinking to get one, you can check out the prices and release dates of the latest earbuds in this article or click on the link below to pre-order them.