While Samsung’s new high-end Galaxy S20 smartphones definitely stole their launch with their incredible cameras and “Space Zoom”, but if you’re like me, odds are you were pretty excited about the brand new Galaxy Buds+ too. After all, they were rumoured to be a pretty significant update over the Galaxy Buds.
However, today we found out that at least one of the Galaxy Buds+’s features do not work the way I’m sure most of us would have thought. And this feature is the support for multi-device connections.
According to a report by DroidLife, Samsung’s multi-device connection with Bluetooth 5.0 devices only work with Samsung smartphones that have the SmartThings app installed. In a statement to DroidLife, Samsung said:
“Galaxy Buds+ offers users a convenient way to transition across devices that are logged into the same Samsung account with the SmartThings app installed. This feature can be accessed in the media panel (by selecting Galaxy Buds+), and is only available on Samsung mobile devices running Android 7.1.1 or later.”
–Samsung
As you would expect, this is kind of a bummer for those of us who were expecting this kind of seamless transition between devices like our smartphone and our laptop. After all, I feel I personally make that switch a lot more than I do between smartphones—what more Samsung Galaxy smartphones.
This whole situation started when some folks on Reddit found that Samsung had edited the Galaxy Buds+ product page to remove the whole “Multi-point connection is available with devices using Bluetooth 5.0” statement. And the whole reason people went looking for this was probably because nobody could figure out exactly how to make this multi-point connection thing work.
Still, does this mean that you should immediately go up in arms and boycott the Galaxy Buds+? Well, I don’t really know if this is that big of a deal. Sure, it’s a crappy move from the South Korean electronics giant, but the rest of the Galaxy Buds+ sure look like a tempting update anyway. Especially considering the fact that these headphones are priced at RM599.
In any case, let this be a PSA so you don’t go in expecting one feature only to be greeted by something that doesn’t really work as well.
