First look: Galaxy Buds 4 Pro pics reveal one big design change

Samsung has been cooking up a new generation of earbuds, and we’re expecting to see the Galaxy Buds 4 and Buds 4 Pro make their debut alongside the Galaxy S26 launch. Ahead of that, though, we’ve been working to give you an early look at this hardware and its capabilities, and started off this week by sharing a detailed preview of the Galaxy Buds 4 Pro thanks to assets revealed in a One UI 8.5 leak.

That included a whole bunch of animations extracted from One UI 8.5, showing off how you’ll use the Galaxy Buds 4 Pro and their case, but just like the earlier Buds 4 imagery we uncovered, these were once again vector-based illustrations rather then actual photos — much more detailed ones, this time around, but artistic renderings nonetheless.

Well, we’ve kept on digging, and now we can finally share the fruits of those efforts with you: the first actual photo-realistic imagery we’ve seen of the Samsung Galaxy Buds 4 Pro.

Here you see, in both white and black, the Galaxy Buds Pro 4. The overall shape conforms exactly with the graphics we’ve already shared, but these pics add a new detail of which we’d previously been unaware: that rather large metal grille on the sides.

We wouldn’t expect the noise-cancellation or ambient mic to need quite that large an opening, so this feels like an especially aesthetic touch — it certainly is evocative of what we think about when we picture microphones, even if it’s being made more prominent here than functionally needed.

Our recent teardown already gave us a lot of insight into what to expect from Buds 4 Pro functionality, and now we’re fleshing out our understanding of the hardware itself. We’ve still got well over a month to go before we’re expecting Samsung to go official with its new earbuds, so who knows what else we’ll manage to dig up in the interim? Keep checking back for our latest finds.