Samsung Galaxy Buds 4 Pro Review

Three Pairs of Earbuds Gone in a Year. So I Got Smarter.

A set of Sony WF-1000XM4 slipped out of my jacket somewhere between Indiranagar and Koramangala. A pair of cheap boAts disappeared from my gym bag, and I still couldn’t tell you how. And some AirPods Pro 2 drowned in the washing machine because I never checked my kurta pocket before laundry day. Three pairs, twelve months. Something clearly had to give.

So when the Samsung Galaxy Buds 4 Pro showed up for testing at Rs 17,999, the first box I went looking for wasn’t sound or ANC. It was SmartThings Find — Samsung’s answer to “where on earth did I leave these.” Which tells you a lot about what actually matters in something you grab every single day: that it’s reliable, that it’s convenient, and that you’re not abandoning Rs 18,000 of electronics in the back of a Bangalore auto.

Four weeks of daily use later, I’ve got a lot more to say than just the find-my-buds bit. But we’ll start there, because for people like me it might genuinely be the headline.

Tracking Down Buds You’ve Lost

SmartThings Find drops the last known spot of the buds onto a map. If they’re within Bluetooth range, roughly 10 metres, you can make them ring out loud. The case reports its own location separately, so even with dead buds you can chase the case down. And if some other Galaxy phone wanders past your lost buds, the Galaxy Find Network quietly pings their location back to you.

I tested it on purpose. Left the case at a coffee shop, walked off, pulled up SmartThings on my phone. There it was on the map, accurate to about 5 metres. Made it beep from across the area. Walked back, found it on the exact table I’d left it. Simple, and it worked. For someone who’s binned three pairs, that peace of mind is worth real money.

Could I get the same off AirPods and Find My? Sure. But I’m carrying a Galaxy S25 Ultra, and Samsung’s version inside its own backyard is tighter than Apple’s reach across platforms.

The Look and the Feel

Bean-shaped. Samsung’s stuck with roughly this shape since the first Galaxy Buds, and the 4 Pro tweaks it rather than starting over. Smooth matte plastic shell, small Samsung logo, no stem — they sit in the canal and the concha without poking out much. Discreet next to anything AirPods-shaped.

The new Comfort Guard tips come in four sizes, XS through L. It took me three goes to land the fit. Medium felt loose, Large felt tight, and I ended up running a Medium on the left and a Large on the right, because apparently my ear canals don’t match. Odd, but it sealed perfectly. There’s an ear-tip fit test in the Galaxy Wearable app that measures the seal acoustically and tells you whether ANC will do its best — which is actually useful, unlike the “shove them in and pray” routine most brands give you.

The buds themselves carry an IPX7 rating. I’ve worn them through monsoon-grade rain, sweaty gym sessions, and one brutal treadmill run where sweat was openly dripping off me. No trouble at all. The case, mind you, isn’t IPX7, so keep that one dry.

They come in Onyx (black), White, and a new Graphite that’s a soft dark grey. I had the Onyx. Understated, looks the part in a meeting.

Each bud weighs 5.5 grams. Light enough that ten minutes in I stop registering them. Three or four hours of straight listening and my ears don’t tire. On a six-hour Mumbai flight, mild discomfort crept in around hour five — and that’s a strong result for in-ear buds of any brand.

Sound: Two Drivers, One Persuasive Case

The 4 Pro run a two-way driver setup, a 10.5mm woofer for bass and mids and a 6.1mm tweeter up top. That split gives you noticeably cleaner frequency separation than the single-driver buds you’ll find at this price.

Bass first. Punchy, present, kept on a leash. It doesn’t boom or bleed into the mids. Kick drums hit with real impact. Bass guitars have texture rather than just a low growl. Not as gut-level as the Sony WF-1000XM5, which digs deeper into the sub-bass, but tighter and cleaner. For Bollywood tracks heavy on dhol and bass drops, the 4 Pro give you a satisfying thump that never bullies the vocals.

The mids. Clear, forward. Arijit Singh’s falsetto arrives with detail and feeling. Female vocals carry warmth and no nasal edge. Acoustic guitar has natural body. Podcasts, which live entirely in this range, sound excellent, with speech so intelligible that the long listens go down easy.

Treble. Extended, detailed, never harsh. Hi-hats shimmer instead of splashing. Strings in classical pieces get air and presence. Crank the volume and a faint hardness shows up on certain sibilant consonants in English pop, but you’d have to be listening hard to catch it.

The 360 Audio spatial trick with head tracking is convincing on Samsung devices when the content supports it. I watched a Netflix film with spatial audio on, and the dialogue tracked the characters across the screen while ambient sounds drifted in from slightly behind me. It’s a gimmick for music, but for video it pulls you in for real. To get the full effect you need a Galaxy phone; on other Android phones you get basic spatial audio with no head tracking.

EQ in the Galaxy Wearable app lets you reshape the sound with presets (Bass Boost, Soft, Dynamic, Clear, Treble Boost) or a manual 6-band slider. I landed on a mildly boosted bass preset with the treble nudged up one notch, which gave me the warm, full sound I like for mixed-genre listening.

ANC: Smart, and Getting Smarter

“Intelligent ANC 2.0” is marketing for an adaptive system that adjusts in real time to whatever noise it’s hearing. In practice: walk out of a quiet office onto a loud street and the ANC ramps up by itself, no fiddling. Head back in and it eases off to save battery.

How it does against specific noise:

Delhi Metro train noise: decent on the low-frequency rumble, maybe 70 to 75% knocked down. Not Sony XM6 level (those are over-ear, so it’s not a fair fight), but ahead of the AirPods Pro 2 in my side-by-side.

Office AC hum: basically gone. Can’t hear it at all with ANC on, even with the music paused.

Street traffic through an open window: meaningfully cut. Horns and engines drop to a background murmur rather than an intrusion. Not silent, but easy to sit with.

People talking at normal volume: this is the spot where in-ear ANC still wobbles. The 4 Pro pull conversation down by maybe 50 to 60%. You can tell someone’s speaking, you just can’t make out the words. Put music on even quietly and the talking vanishes.

Conversation Detect is Samsung’s auto-transparency. Start talking and ANC pauses, the room pipes in, and the music dips. Stop for about five seconds and ANC comes back and the music returns. It nails it maybe 90% of the time, occasionally missing my first word or two, and very rarely firing off a loud sigh. But it’s become second nature for me. Ordering chai, answering a quick question from a colleague, thanking a delivery guy — all without touching the buds.

Galaxy AI Live Translate: Actually Useful Here

This one feature alone might justify the Samsung tax for some buyers. Live Translate uses on-device AI to translate spoken language as it happens, straight through the earbuds. Someone speaks Hindi at you and the English plays in your ear. You answer in English and the phone’s speaker pushes out the Hindi.

I tried Hindi to English: around 80 to 85% accurate on clearly spoken sentences. Fast talk, heavy accents or background noise drag it down. Tamil to English: maybe 70%, with more grammar slips in the output. Kannada’s on the list but was clearly shakier in my testing.

Good enough to replace a human translator? No. Good enough to scrape through a basic conversation with someone whose language you don’t speak? Yes, if you’re patient and willing to repeat yourself. In a country running 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects, that’s genuinely handy for travellers and for anyone living in a state where they don’t speak the local tongue well.

The big catch: it needs a Galaxy phone. Other Android phones can’t touch it. iPhone users, obviously, can’t either.

Battery and Charging

9 hours from the buds with ANC running. My real number: 7.5 to 8, depending on how loud I went and how hard the ANC worked. With ANC off, closer to 10 or 11.

The case holds two more full charges, so 24 hours total with ANC. In practice I top the case up once a week, roughly every five or six days at two to three hours a day. It charges over USB-C or on a Qi2 pad. A 10-minute quick charge buys about an hour of playback, which saves you in the “call in five minutes and the buds are dead” moment.

The Galaxy Wearable app shows battery for the left bud, the right bud, and the case separately. Small thing, but it lets you spot if one bud’s draining faster than the other, which usually means the tip on that side isn’t sealing right.

Call Quality: Three Mics Earning Their Keep

The three-mic setup with a wind shield does a fair job on calls. People said I came through clear and natural indoors in the quiet. In moderate outdoor noise, street traffic and a bit of wind, my voice stayed intelligible though they could hear some of the background. In heavy noise, standing on a busy road in strong wind, callers could follow me but it wasn’t pleasant. About level with AirPods Pro 2 on calls, a step behind Sony’s WF-1000XM5.

On video calls over Google Meet and Zoom they held up well. I ran three separate hour-long team meetings on them with no audio complaints from anyone. The low-latency gaming mode trims Bluetooth delay for mobile gaming — I tried it on BGMI and the audio stayed locked to the picture. Not wired-tight, but no lag I could feel mid-match.

Living With the Buds 4 Pro

After four weeks these have become my default. The routine: grab the case off the nightstand, pop the buds in for the morning commute, hop between phone and laptop through the workday, gym in the evening, a podcast on the walk home. The Auto Switch feature shuffles the buds between my Galaxy phone, my Galaxy Tab and my laptop as I move between them. No manual reconnecting. It all just flows.

Comfort over a long wear is excellent. The bean shape spreads the pressure across the concha instead of jamming it into the canal. Running, lifting, even an upside-down yoga pose — they stayed put. I never bothered with the optional wing tips because the basic fit already held.

Touch controls on the outer face: one tap to play or pause, double to skip ahead, triple to go back, press and hold to flip between ANC and transparency. Responsive, rarely mis-fired. The sensitivity felt right from day one and I never touched it in the app.

The Galaxy Wearable App and the Extras

Samsung’s Galaxy Wearable app is mission control — EQ, touch controls, ANC levels, find-my-buds, firmware. The layout is clean and makes sense. Took me about five minutes to set everything up the first time. The ear-tip fit test confirmed my mismatched-size arrangement was sealing right; the seal bar climbed from 70% (medium both sides) to 95% (medium left, large right).

Firmware drops land now and then, and one of them nudged ANC up during my testing — a small update Samsung said “improved noise cancellation in windy environments.” Anecdotally, I did notice a bit less wind noise on outdoor runs afterward, though it might be placebo. Either way, active software support counts for buds at this price.

One feature I dismissed at first and now use all the time: bud edge lighting. When your phone’s face-down and a notification lands, the buds play a soft tone and the edge of your phone screen glows in a colour matched to the notification type. A Galaxy exclusive, naturally. But for anyone in the ecosystem, these little touches pile up into something that feels thought-through rather than thrown together.

Straight Answer: Should You Buy Them?

Here’s the decision tree I’d walk a friend through if they asked.

You’ve got a Samsung Galaxy phone (S24 or S25 series)? Buy them. The ecosystem stuff — Auto Switch, Live Translate, 360 Audio with head tracking, SmartThings Find, the camera shutter remote — adds up to justify the price. No other TWS buds give you this much working alongside a Samsung phone.

You’ve got a non-Samsung Android phone? Look at the Sony WF-1000XM5 around the same money. You’ll get better ANC and equal sound without paying for the Samsung-only features you can’t use anyway. The 4 Pro work fine on other Android, but you’re buying things you’ll never touch.

You’ve got an iPhone? Get the AirPods Pro 3. Honestly. The Samsung buds will pair with an iPhone but you lose about 40% of why they’re good. AirPods inside Apple’s world are what these are inside Samsung’s.

Budget under Rs 10,000? The Nothing Ear (a) or the Galaxy Buds FE give you 70% of this for half the price. The 4 Pro are better, no argument, but the gap may not be worth doubling your spend.

You lose earbuds constantly (hi)? SmartThings Find alone might be worth the entry fee. Four weeks in, zero losses. For me, that’s a personal best.

One last thing on longevity. Samsung tends to keep updating Galaxy Buds with firmware for about two years after launch. The original Galaxy Buds Pro picked up ANC tweaks and new features well past release day. Going by that record, the 4 Pro should keep getting better through software over their life. That ongoing support adds something concrete to the Rs 17,999 ask versus budget brands, where firmware updates are rare and new features basically never show up. At this tier you’re buying into a product that evolves, not one frozen on the day you opened the box.

Price in India

The Samsung Galaxy Buds 4 Pro go for Rs 17,999 in India, on Samsung.com, Amazon India, Flipkart and Samsung’s own stores. They’re often bundled at a discount when you buy a Galaxy S25 series phone.

Full Specifications

Pros

• Galaxy AI Live Translate unique
• 9-hour battery
• Intelligent ANC 2.0
• 360 Audio spatial sound
• IPX7 water resistance

Cons

• Expensive ₹17,999
• Best features Samsung phones only
• ANC below Sony WH-1000XM6 level
• Fit varies by ear shape

Our Rating: 8.7/10 · Price: ₹17,999