Samsung says the Galaxy Buds+ multi-device feature only supports Galaxy phones with SmartThings installed

Last year’s Samsung Galaxy Buds were Samsung’s attempt to enter the truly wireless earbuds market, a market that had been popularized by the Apple AirPods. By most accounts, the Galaxy Buds were a success as they made Samsung one of the major players in this expensive and profitable market. The Galaxy Buds launched alongside the Samsung Galaxy S10 series. One year later, the company launched an upgraded variant of the earbuds called the Galaxy Buds+ alongside the Samsung Galaxy S20 series. The new Galaxy Buds+ have better battery life, better audio quality, and better microphones. At launch, Samsung even mentioned “multi-point” (multi-device) support for devices using Bluetooth 5.0, which would have been a major new feature addition. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. The Galaxy Buds do sort of have a multi-device feature, but as Droid Life discovered, it only supports Galaxy phones with the Samsung SmartThings app installed.

The Galaxy Buds+ can now be bought for $149. Droid Life tested their multi-device connectivity. The publication’s report starts by saying some people had noticed that Samsung had edited the Galaxy Buds+ product page to remove this sentence: “Multi-point connection is available for devices using Bluetooth 5.0.” No reviewer was able to figure out how to connect multiple devices to a pair at the same time, as it didn’t work between devices of different manufacturers. This indicated that Samsung had pulled back the feature, but after looking at the Galaxy Buds+ product page, Droid Life noticed it still had a section called “Switch Seamlessly,” where Samsung describes how the Buds+ “intuitively switches between two paired devices at once.” The example was “So you won’t miss a call on your phone while you’re using your tablet.” This made it seem that the feature still existed, contradicting the removal of the multi-point sentence.

Droid Life reached out to Samsung for comment as this was supposedly one of the upgrades of the Galaxy Buds+. The company made the following statement:

“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.”

This means the Galaxy Buds+ can only perform a multi-device switch between two Samsung devices running Android 7.1.1 and newer, and the SmartThings app must be installed on both. SmartThings will enable the user to tap within the media panel on each device to move the Galaxy Buds+ connection between the two devices, and Droid Life was able to make this happen with a Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip. For non-Samsung phones, the procedure remains the same: users must turn off the Bluetooth of the currently connected devices and then re-connect to the second device.

So it’s multi-device support indeed, but it’s not a useful feature for those users not having multiple Samsung devices. Those users who use multiple phones from different device makers will still have to move the device connection in the traditional way, which is why it made sense for Samsung to remove the incorrect sentence on the product page of the Galaxy Buds+.

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Source: Droid Life

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