Enough with the "copying" garbage. Samsung was the first of the two companies with true wireless earbuds. Their Gear IconX headphones preceded the AirPods to market by 6 months. (They rebranded their wearables division, dropping the "Gear", in 2018.) And in the going on 5 years since Apple released the AirPods, there has been absolutely no attempt by Samsung to emulate their form or function. Instead, Samsung has continued to iterate on their pre-existing product. The same with their smartwatches: preceded the Apple Watch by 2 years, introduced LTE to smartwatches back when everyone mocked it as a ridiculous concept, and continue to mostly do their own thing with it regardless of what Apple's product does.
I know that a lot of people are still salty over the "rounded corners/home button/pinch to zoom" thing but seriously that was 2009. Since Samsung went in their own direction with the Galaxy Note - and "phablets" in general - and became the largest selling smartphone company in the world as a result, the most significant idea that Samsung has gotten from Apple was dropping the headphone jack. By contrast, since then Apple has adopted A) the phablet form factor, B) the multi-tasking UI features, C) stylus support, D) curved OLED screens, E) dropped the home button, F) will within the next 2 years adopt in screen fingerprint scanners and foldable phones ... modern iPhones have far more in common with the look and UX/UI of Samsung Galaxy phones - and this will be the case even more so when iOS 14 is released - than they do all iPhones released before the iPhone 6. But Samsung won't sue because they are making far more money selling Apple the components that Apple uses to make iPhones more closely resemble Samsung phones!
Yeah, in typical fashion, Samsung heard Apple was producing a product and rushed a CRAP-QUALITY device to market in order to be able to exclaim "1st!"
The original Galaxy true wireless buds were widely panned as substandard and HORRIBLE.
ALSO — they were not original, there were several models ALREADY on the market, and which were superior. Samsung DID copy the looks and features of those models.
How do I know? Because I had several of the predecessors—the actual 'first' products. And even though they did suffer from problems, they were ALL better than Samsung's crappy first attempt.
I had the Bragi Headphone had great battery life, good sound, fit snugly in the ears for passive noise isolation, and were solid in terms of connectivity. These were released in 2016-2017. Bragi made two models — The Dash, and a less expensive version, The Headphone. I purchased the latter. The only difference between the two was removal of touch functionality in exchange for tiny buttons. Which made them
very affordable at the time.
After those, I decided to go 'all-in' and spend more for higher quality and better sound (the Bragi had great sound but did not get loud enough and weren't set deeply enough in the ear canal to passively block sound properly.
So I purchased the 2017 v1 Bang & Olufsen e8 — but I waited 3 months for the software to be updated. They were perfect, and had amazing sound. They still work today. I loved them so much, I upgraded last year to the 2019 version 2. These passively block around 20 decibels of sound — which is about as good as you can get with a passive aural block. I am tempted by the new v3, which has extended battery life (by +3 hours) due to Bluetooth 5.1, but I suspect the next version will include ANC. That would make them perfect!
