Samsung has new Galaxy headphones in the works
The first new Samsung headphones in a decade could go up against Apple’s AirPods Max next year.
The first new Samsung headphones in a decade could go up against Apple’s AirPods Max next year.
by Aug 14, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Stevie Bonifield is a news writer covering all things consumer tech. Stevie started out at Laptop Mag writing news and reviews on hardware, gaming, and AI.
Strings of code in Samsung’s Galaxy Wearable app hint at an upcoming pair of over-ear headphones that could compete with the AirPods Max, SamMobile reports. Samsung’s reportedly referring to the headphones as the “Galaxy H1,” and SamMobile says they could launch sometime in 2027. That would make these the company’s first pair of over-ear headphones since the Level On in 2015, which was released well before Samsung acquired Harman and a number of other audio brands.
Connection status icons in the app standard show the design of over-ear, wireless Bluetooth headphones, but not necessarily exactly what these will look like in the end. Samsung’s main audio device right now is its Galaxy Buds line, but it doesn’t have high-end headphones similar to the AirPods Max or Sony XM series.
Apple released a revised AirPods Max 2 model earlier this year, which looked the same but added a new chip to power more features like adaptive audio and live translation. When the Galaxy H1 launches, as SamMobile points out, we would expect it to include the Samsung Seamless Codec Ultra High Quality (SSC UHQ) codec that works exclusively with 2023 and newer Galaxy phones and tablets, as well as support for AI assistants like Gemini and Bixby that’s similar to what we saw in the Galaxy Buds 4 Pro.
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