I have the Watch3 and Buds Live. I really wanted to be able to run using just the buds and watch (no phone). I had a great deal of problems, but I believe I have found a solution. Problem: Buds Live constantly cut-out when outdoors. I speculated that indoors the walls contain and reflect the bluetooth signal from the watch to the buds. When moving outdoors, there is nothing to contain/reflect the signal and so the dropouts happen frequently. I was able to test this but walking under trees with low hanging, leafy branches. Bingo the bluetooth becomes reliable again. So this explains why going outdoors makes the bluetooth connection less reliable. But there's more... I wear my Watch3 on my left wrist. The default primary Buds Live bud is the right one. When walking and with my arm swinging normally the buds will constantly cut-out. I believe this is due to my arm swinging to my waist in which case my entire torso is between the watch and the bud. Cut-outs galore. Simply moving my watch to my right wrist eliminates the cut-outs. A simple solution, no? But we can do better... Best Solution: The Buds Live are really quite advanced and among other features they have the ability use just one bud if necessary. For example, if the battery dies on one bud you can continue to use the other. The stream will switch to mono but it's better than nothing. The whole point is that both buds can apparently act as master. So, I figured it might be worth testing whether I could force the left ear-bud to be the master. It turns out you can make the left ear-bud the master as follows (not an official Samsung procedure)... Put the buds in the case for a moment to allow them to power down. Open the case and put the left bud in your ear. Start your music source. Note: At this point the right bud is still in the case, and not connected to bluetooth. Now you should have music playing in your left ear. Next, remove the right bud and put it in your right ear. Bingo! The watch is on my left wrist (where I prefer it) and the cut-outs are gone! Now, I'll admit there is something here I don't completely understand. Normally, a master-slave configuration on the buds has one bud always dominant and the other bud receives a rebroadcast bluetooth signal from the first bud. For buds that can play independently they can both act as primary and receive the bluetooth signal from the source. These Samsung buds seem to have one bud broadcast to the other, but either the left or right can do so. Think about it. If the right bud were still receiving the signal from the watch, it would continue to cutout when the watch is on my left wrist. But when I follow the procedure above, the left bud becomes master and appears to broadcast to the right bud. Like most master-slave buds, they have no problem communicating with each other, even though our head is in the way. The distance between my ears and the signal blocking is much less than from my ear through my torso to my waist. Samsung - we are so close to a perfect set of buds. For those of us who have bought into your ecosystem (for me S20+ 5G, Watch3 and Buds Live), please take the extra step to allow the Wear app to default the left bud to the master. It would be so much more convenient. The buds apparently have the capability to do this. When I follow the annoying procedure above, the Watch3 and Buds Live live up to your promises. Sadly for you and me I returned two pairs of Buds as defective before I figured out the procedure described above. You could do us and you a big favor if you just made an option for people who wear their watch on their left arm.
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