Google’s new Pixel Buds release nears as they show up at Bluetooth SIG

Back in October of 2019, we had the opportunity to travel to New York and see all of Google’s newest hardware for the next year. While the Pixelbook Go stole the show for us, one other piece of hardware was announced that I personally was just as excited about: the new Pixel Buds. With a ton of great tech built in, a beautiful build, a tiny charging/carrying case, and all the features I’ve been waiting for in a set of wireless earbuds, the Pixel Buds had me extremely excited when they were officially announced. And then they revealed the release date. Queue the sad trombone.

Spring 2020 is the only real thing Google said about the release date for these great-looking headphones, and in my mind that translated to a March or April time frame for release. Maybe I put that time in my head to shield me from lusting after these earbuds all winter, but the truth is Spring is just around the corner. Technically speaking, we don’t hit Spring until later in March, but many consider March 1st the real start to the Spring season. I mean, the MLB Spring Training starts in February!

We can talk semantics all day, and we still don’t technically know when Google will release the new Pixel Buds, but today’s news from 9to5 Google may at least point us in the direction of sooner rather than later. The Pixel Buds have shown up in the Bluetooth SIG and though the new details are fairly light, this could point to an early Spring release versus a later one. Those additional details only include the fact that the Bluetooth chip is made by Bestechnic (as opposed to Qualcomm) and supports Bluetooth 5.0 (which felt a bit like a given).

Those details aside, the bigger news here is the fact that these are passing through the Bluetooth SIG at this point. Keep in mind the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook just passed the same certification about a week ago, and we expect it to show up in March. While this isn’t a 1-to-1 comparison, it simply makes little sense for Google to put off launching these earbuds any longer than necessary since they’ve already been publicly unveiled to the world in a pretty big way. We’ve seen speculation that we may not see the Pixel Buds until Google I/O in May, but I’d contend that we’ll see them quite a bit before then. There’s no guarantee, but it would be very odd for Google to push these through Bluetooth certification in January if there was no plan on actually launching until May.

Either way, I can’t wait until these earbuds are finally released. With great battery, a great design, a small/light case, touch controls and ambient noise control, Google could have a real winner on its hands. There are tons of very nice sounding earbuds out there on the market, so I have little doubt these will sound great. As long as they do, I’ll be first in line to pick up a pair when they hopefully launch sometime in March.