00:00 – Mishaal Rahman: Samsung might be going back to the drawing board for its next set of Galaxy Buds.
00:04 – C. Scott Brown: And Google may have torn down Apple’s walled garden.
00:07 – Mishaal Rahman: I’m Mishaal Rahman.
00:10 – C. Scott Brown: And I’m C. Scott Brown, and this is the Authority Insights Podcast where we break down the latest news and leaks surrounding the Android operating system.
00:18 – Mishaal Rahman: It feels like every year Samsung just keeps switching up the design of its Galaxy Buds. With last year’s Galaxy Buds Pro 3, we had this kind of triangular blade design, but now it looks like for next year’s Galaxy Buds Pro 4, we might be getting a flatter stem as well as some new head tracking features.
00:36 – C. Scott Brown: And in a surprise twist, it looks like Google has secretly added AirDrop capabilities to Quick Share, which is crazy. This makes it really easy to wirelessly share files between Android smartphones and Apple iPhones. There are some limitations that we’re going to get into and there is a strong possibility that this is not going to last long, but we’ll talk about that later.
And in another story, is Samsung making a smart move by copying the Pixel 10’s Magic Cue feature for its next version of One UI? We certainly hope they know what they’re doing because Magic Cue is not exactly the most impressive feature ever, but, you know, got to give it to Samsung for trying to do new things.
01:21 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah. Before we get into the obviously the biggest story that you all want to hear about, and trust me, you’ll want to stay tuned for that because we have some kind of exclusive behind-the-scenes tidbits about Quick Share’s compatibility with AirDrop that we want to share. But before we get into that and before we start talking about our first story of the week, I did want to mention that next week’s episode won’t happen because it’ll be Thanksgiving week in the US, so both Scott and myself will be out on vacation. So no podcast next week. We’ll return the following week after that.
So, circling back to the first story, the Galaxy Buds Pro 4, or at least what we think is going to end up shaping up to be the Galaxy Buds Pro 4. We did some digging into leaked One UI 8.5 builds, our Authority Insights team, and we discovered evidence that Samsung might be ditching the sharp triangular blade design of the Buds Pro 3 in favor of a new flatter stem design. And they are also removing some distinctive features that made the Buds Pro 3 more unique. They are removing the light blades and getting rid of that light feature entirely. And some photorealistic looking images that we found within the firmware suggest that they are going to be adding a large metal grille on the side of the earbuds and that we think that these will be covering the microphones for ANC transparency mode, but likely just an aesthetic choice to make it look nicer. And we also learned through this animation that if I can find the video right here that you’ll actually be placing the buds inside the case kind of horizontally instead of dropping them vertically into the case like you do right now with the design. And also we also discovered there’s a speaker grille on this case, which we believe will be powering a Find Your Phone feature kind of similar to what the AirPods Pro currently does.
And speaking of features, we have discovered that head tracking might be one of the unique capabilities, the new capabilities of the Galaxy Buds Pro 4. So these earbuds will be able to detect your head movement. You’ll be able to nod or shake your head to answer or reject calls or notifications, dismiss alarms, timers, and calendar alerts, interact with voice assistants without speaking. And yeah, as we mentioned, the other new feature would be on the case itself, there’ll be a button that you can tap to initiate a find my earbuds feature. So Scott, Samsung just introduced that triangular blade shape design on the Buds Pro 3 last year, and it seems like they’re already pivoting and completely switching things up. Why do you think they’re abandoning that design and switching to this new flatter, more rounded design in the Buds Pro 4?
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