Music is a major part of millions of people’s lives all around the world. The rise in popularity of online music services such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Pandora (which was just acquired by Sirius XM Holdings) has shown that even though people don’t buy physical CDs anymore, they are more than willing to pay a monthly subscription to have access to the music they like. Smartphone OEMs are smart to take notice of this and Samsung looks to be upping their game with a pair of branded earbuds.
Notably known as AKG Acoustics (and formally known as Akustische und Kino-Geräte Gesellschaft m.b.H), AKG has always prided themselves in their audio products (headphones and microphones). The company was acquired by Harman International Industries back in 1994 and then Harman was bought by Samsung Electronics just a couple of years ago. For years, Samsung’s flagship smartphones have boasted about the “tuned by AKG” wireless earbuds that are packaged inside the box.
So it makes sense that Samsung has been leveraging the AKG brand for their wired earbuds as the company has been in the acoustics engineering industry since 1947. While these “tuned by AKG” earbuds haven’t been the worst audio listening devices, they could be better if Samsung put more focus into them. This is where the new trademark application for Samsung Buds comes into play. The trademark application was filed in Europe and could be one of many different things.
They could be what Samsung calls the regular earbuds that they pack into their flagship smartphones for free. A more likely story is that these will be Samsung’s answer to products such as Apple’s AirPods, Google’s Pixel Buds, or the OnePlus Bullets. Samsung already has their own wireless earbud brand though, known as the Samsung Gear IconX series. So there are a couple of possibilities that could happen here. Samsung could keep their Gear IconX brand around and simply introduce the Samsung Buds as a new product (possibly one that is closer to the form factor of the Google Pixel Buds and OnePlus Bullets).
Or, since the Gear branding was mostly tied to the company’s smartwatch products, the new version of the IconX earbuds could just be rebranded as the Samsung Buds. All we have to go on is the European trademark application right now, but this product could end up being launched with the Galaxy S10, or possibly next year’s Galaxy Note series.
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