While Apple and Pixel owners have their own earbuds with special features, Samsung phone owners have the option of reaching for something like the Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 FE. They’re a pair of last-gen Samsung buds that are still great and a good match for Samsung’s Galaxy mobile phones, with extra app support, one touch pairing, and impressive noise-canceling and sound quality for the price. If you head over to Amazon, you can save $20 on either the Black or Gray version.
One area where Samsung’s buds shine is the sound quality. They have a big, bold sound with great detail from the midrange up through the top end, and a fairly wide soundstage. The result is a pleasantly robust listening experience, with one minor note worth mentioning. The buds come with a volume normalization disabled, which results in a muddled sound, and you’ll need to connect them to a Samsung phone to disable the setting. Once you do, they sound a lot better, and you can even tweak them further with the Wear app’s nine-band equalizer.
They also excel at active noise-canceling, something other earbuds at this price point don’t always handle that well. It works the best with low-frequency noises, like the whir of a plane engine, and it has adjustable levels so you can move from almost complete silence to transparency mode for a quick chat. It doesn’t quite compete with some of the best earbuds on the market, but it should be more than good enough for most folks. The microphone quality is excellent too, with awesome noise isolation for crystal clear calling, and you can even leverage the transparency mode for some talk-back, which is also adjustable in the app.
You may find these work a lot better with Samsung phones than with other Android or iOS devices, so if you aren’t in the Galaxy universe, I’d rocket over to our guide to the best wireless earbuds we’ve tested. Otherwise you can grab the Samsung Galaxy Buds 3 FE from Amazon for their discounted price of $130. I also spotted them in stock at Best Buy if that’s your preferred retailer.
