Samsung has showed off a Galaxy Buds prototype with a circular OLED display on the case at CES 2024.
CES 2024 has almost wrapped up for another year, and all of the big companies (and most of the small ones for that matter) have played their hands. But there’s still the odd nugget of novelty to be found out on the showroom floor.
Take this little oddity from the Samsung Display booth, which would have been easy to miss among all the cute robots and bendy screen prototypes.
Samsung has been showing off the generically titled Earbuds OLED Case, which is effective a set of Galaxy Buds true wireless earphones (those are the Galaxy Buds 2 pictured above) with a circular OLED display on the case. CNET captured a brief video of the Earbuds OLED Case in action.
The OLED display is being used to display familiar time widgets (seemingly straight from the Galaxy Watch), as well as live battery information and a spinning record music streaming app animation. More usefully, this touchscreen component lets you adjust core earphones settings without having to dive into the associated smartphone app.
Samsung claims it has no intention of turning this Galaxy Watch prototype into an actual product, at least at present. As mentioned, this was on the Samsung Display booth, so it’s intended to showcase the compact OLED technology rather than the product.
However, this hasn’t stopped JBL from launching its Live 3 Earbuds at CES 2024, with its case containing a touchscreen display that lets you manage texts, calls, and social media alerts. JBL, of course, is owned by Harman, which is a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics.
In other words, if the JBL Live 3 Earbuds do well this June (they’ll cost €199.99), Samsung will be one of the first to know about it, and will have everything in place to drop a pimped up Galaxy Buds spin-off like this into the market.
