Issues with second-gen Gear IconX continue to grow, as Samsung acts nonchalant

Truth to be told, I’m not an audiophile. I’m not after FLAC, nor desperate to have headphone jack. Wireless headphones seem adequate for me, but if I’m paying a premium price for it I would expect classy quality too.

Certainly it is not happening with Gear IconX (2018). Samsung’s answer to Apple AirPods hit another yearly refresh in late 2017 after the original Gear IconX, but it’s facing hapless reviews since then.

The initial half of 2018 was full of customer complains about the low volume bug, which was also highlighted and covered by our team. Add some more months, and we are now going towards February 2019, but the list of issues keep increasing.

Apart from the low volumes, we have noticed multiple common buggy symptoms reported by the users (as reported in Samsung forums: here, here and countless other threads). Low volume on one piece (example), issues with in-ear detection (example) & music playback (example: here, here), need for repeated cleanup, mesh pairing bugs – just to name a few which are serious indicators of faulty quality control from Samsung’s end.

Samsung’s effective weapon to tackle these problems is to offer 2  years free repair and/or replacement service:

https://twitter.com/DementedAI/status/1086069492189257728

You may get suggestions from official sources as well as community members to use the inbox cleaning kit. While YouTube is now full of such ‘tutorials’ to fix the low volume bug by cleaning, not all users get the benefit from it. On the other hand, some of them reported the absence of such cleaning kits in their original packaging.

Hi I am also facing the same issue and i have replaced the earbuds once. The cleaning kit that was supposed to be inside the packing was not present for mine.

Mine was bought in Singapore. Is it possible for me to get the cleaning kit from a local servcing centre in Singapore? (Source)

On the replacement part, there are reports of running third or fourth replacement but the issues persist. Some other reports suggest (example) a halted firmware update may trigger some of the bugs, which can be fixed by completing the update process and re-pair them.

On my 4th pair. 2 exchanges in store, 1 mailed in in same problem keeps happening right ear goes out. Just a poor product. (Source)

They started out amazing! But as time went buy, I began to notice that first left ear got quieter than normal, then the right ear would get quiet after a mere hour of use. Now I’m at the point where my right ear doesn’t work at all and I am beyond disappointed in Samsung for releasing such a product with such a price tag and no mesh replacement kits to be found anywhere. For their price tag, these things have a short life span and I DO NOT recommend buying these for people who just want to listen to music. Just God awful. These headphones don’t survive long enough to be so expensive. I’m upset, Samsung. (Source)

Im so disappointed with Samsung, I’m using a Note 8 and Gear Frontier and both work perfectly, I bought this earbuds with the promise of quality and it was like take my money and threw it to the toilet.
2 weeks, only for 2 weeks this earbuds worked fine, suddenly one of the lost its volume, so I had the left one with 100% volume and the right with only 50% (I guess).
I read a lot of blogs trying to find a solution and did a lot of things, even had to chance the mesh in both earbuds with only 2 weeks. Do you think that its normal to do that with a new product?, off course not.
I’m still using them at the gym, even with volume issues, c’mon I paid almost $200, but guess what?, this shit developed a new feature today, it turned off every time it wants. 4 times today, I was doing my exercises and again suddenly it turned off.
Now, more than ever, I’m saving money to buy a new ones, but SONY, this brand (Samsung), works perfectly with phones.
Don’t waste your money, just type in Google “Samsung Icon X volume issues”, and you will find hundreds of people suffering with this. (Source)

Among these pandemonia, consumers are even demanding a formal recall of Gear IconX (2018). Probably we won’t see that to happen as 2019 refresh is nearby, but clearly the second generation of Samsung’s earbuds are not as sturdy as the original one overall.

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