Over the last year or so, our long journey towards getting hands-on with the final version of the Samsung Galaxy Ring has been filled with rumors, surprise reveals, a few secret meetings, and plenty of pithy Lord of the Rings jokes.
The smart ring is a brand-new format for Samsung, having previously been the province of startups like Oura Health – which makes our current best smart ring, the Oura Ring. Samsung has a lot riding on the Galaxy Ring being a success; based on known patent filings, Google and Apple are watching very closely, and presumably preparing (if they haven’t done so already) to develop prototypes of their own if the smart ring is deemed workable, helpful and – most of all – profitable. A new age of health-focused wearables has begun.
Having finally handled the gold and black versions of the Galaxy Ring for a few minutes, there’s a lot I can now say about the Ring – although not much about how it works for me. Samsung says its wearable is designed to be a “set and forget” experience, with its unobtrusive form factor and long battery life contributing to the idea that you’ll barely need to think about the Ring while you’re wearing it.
It’s water-resistant to 100 meters, lasts for almost a week (pushing up to 10 days when you combine it with one of Samsung’s best smartwatches, as they share the fitness-tracking load to extend the Ring’s battery life) and has several characteristics built into its construction that help to make it impressively scratch-resistant.
It’s designed to be a passive wearable; while it does have some limited fitness application, its main focus is wellness, which is important to distinguish from fitness. Fitness is workouts. Wellness is a more holistic concept, incorporating an overall approach towards mental and physical wellbeing, recovery, and health. Sleep is a huge part of this, and sleep is the area that the Samsung Galaxy Ring is really designed to excel in.
Samsung Galaxy Ring: specifications
| Component | Samsung Galaxy Ring |
| Price | $399 / £399 / around AU$750 (AU prices TBC) |
| Colors | Black, Titanium Gold, Titanium Silver |
| Material | Titanium |
| Weight | 2.3g (size 5) 3.0g (size 13) |
| Battery life | Up to 7 days (ring), up to 6 charges (cradle) |
| Connectivity | Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Sensor array | PPG, accelerometer, skin temperature |
| Water resistance | 10ATM |
| GPS? | No |
We wants it, Precious: price and availability
The Samsung Galaxy Ring costs both more and less than its chief competitor, the Oura Ring Generation 3 – allow me to explain.
Samsung’s model clocks in at $399 / £399 / around AU$750 (AU prices TBC) and will be on shelves from July 24. For that price, you get the Ring, the charging case, and access to a sizing kit before your ring arrives to ensure that you get the perfect fit.
This isn’t too dissimilar to its competitors: while Ringconn, Ultrahuman and Oura devices are cheaper (Ultrahuman Ring Air and Oura Ring Generation 3 both cost around $299 / £329 / AU$599, and Ringconn undercuts them both at $279 / around £220 or AU$420, market leader Oura also recommends that you pay a $5.99 premium subscription fee after the first six months to get the most out of your ring.
So Samsung’s up-front costs are higher, but without a subscription, it works out cheaper than Oura long-term, although not quite as cheap as the Ultrahuman and Ringconn offerings. One distinct barrier to owning a Samsung Galaxy Ring that it’s important to mention is that it’s designed to work seamlessly with the Samsung Health app, so you’ll need one of the best Samsung phones to make the most of it.
Reinventing the wheel: design
Up until now, I’d only seen and worn a prototype Samsung Galaxy Ring, but the final design is more or less identical to the early models I tried. It was comfortable to wear then, and during my brief tests with the actual ring, that hasn’t changed. It comes in sizes ranging from US sizes 5 to size 13, ranging in weight from 2.3g to 3g, and the exact battery size depends on your ring size: the bigger the ring, the longer it’ll last.
However, the size you wear shouldn’t dramatically affect the performance of the Galaxy Ring; it’ll still keep going for most of the week, passively tracking your health. There’s no display on the ring, which is hardly surprising given its size (although that might not be the case with future versions), so you’ll need to check the Samsung Health app for updates on your ring’s battery life.
You have the option of three colors; Black, Titanium Gold, and Titanium Silver. However, despite their appearance, all are constructed of scratch-resistant titanium. The materials aren’t the only durability feature Samsung has implemented here: the shape of the ring also stops it getting damaged.
If you imagine looking at a section through the ring, most smart rings are either uniformly curved, or concave, so they bulge out slightly relative to the curvature of your finger.
The Samsung Galaxy Ring on the other hand, has a concave shape, a design choice that Samsung has made in order to made to prevent scratches or wear and tear to the surface of the Galaxy Ring, as the protective raised edges function like the bezel of a sports watch. Samsung adopted a similar design with the adventure-focused Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, which had a raised bezel to reduce the possibility of impact on its screen. Below, you can see an image of the concave Galaxy Ring alongside the convex Oura Ring Generation 3.
You can see another, top-down image below of the silver Oura Ring and the gold Galaxy Ring, and as you can see it’s tough to tell them apart. Although the outside of the Samsung Galaxy Ring is very different to its rivals, the underside looks almost identical, with three raised nodules to improve skin contact.
The Galaxy Ring’s charging case is a big improvement on Oura’s. Oura offers a node on which you can place the ring, which plugs into a standard USB-C charger. Samsung has gone one step further and placed the nodule inside an engagement ring-style box, which has its own internal battery, similar to cases for earbuds. The box is transparent, so works with all ring colors, and it can be wirelessly or USB-C charged, and is good for five or six full charges.
When I saw the box I had nightmares of the Ring having to be placed back in the box every 24 hours or so for an additional top-up, but the case is an added convenience, rather than a way to make up for a shortfall in the ring’s battery life.
The inner circle: features
The Ring isn’t stuffed with features in the same way as a Samsung Galaxy Watch might be: with no display, ways of interacting with the device or apps to speak of, it’s designed to be a “set and forget” tracker that passively monitors your health over the course of the week, looking at heart rate, sleep quality, skin temperature, blood oxygen sensing and much more. Galaxy AI allows it to intelligently monitor for unusual heart-rate data and flag inconsistencies.
The Galaxy Ring is designed to be excellent at sleep tracking, just like the Oura, and Samsung has gone all-in here. All the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7’s sleep-guidance features, such as the use of sleep profiles (also known as chronotypes) represented by a cute animal to give you personalized guidance, and using algorithms driven by Galaxy AI to better analyze your sleep health, are all here. Likewise, your ring will generate an Energy Score for you each morning, based on the quality of your sleep and your general activity levels, which is similar to the best Fitbits’ Daily Readiness Score or Garmin’s Body Battery functionality. Collecting metrics via your Ring or Watch and scoring your wellbeing out of 100, Samsung Health can offer personalized advice, telling you to rest as much as you can, or telling you to get out there and give it your all.
The Galaxy Ring records many of the same metrics as the Watch, and feeds them into the same app – Samsung Health – so the similarities are by design. It might put existing Samsung Galaxy Watch users off buying the Ring initially, but they do work together. Samsung says using the Ring in conjunction with your watch extends the Ring’s battery life by up to 30% and increases the accuracy of the metrics recorded; however, I suspect only Samsung power users will opt to buy both devices, unless they’re bundled together as part of a cellphone data package.
Despite the fact that it’s a passive tracker, the Galaxy Ring does have some fitness applications too. It will automatically track walking and running workouts, logging them in the Samsung Health app so you don’t have to go through the process of retroactively ‘tagging’ workouts in a timeline of your heart rate data to explain any anomalies. However, this only works with walking and running, so any other form of activity using the ring, such as swimming or cycling, will need to be qualified in the Samsung Health app.
Individual insights on steps, exercise, and blood oxygen levels are collected automatically, while food, water and medications can all be inputted manually into Samsung Health to create a more complete picture of your health. Menstrual cycle tracking is a big part of most health-tracking tools these days, especially trackers focused on wellness over fitness, and the Galaxy Ring doesn’t disappoint here either, predicting cycles based on overnight skin temperature.
Outside of health tracking, Samsung’s even squeezed in some more general user applications too – and impressively the Galaxy Ring supports gesture controls. Simply pinch the air to dismiss an alarm on a Samsung Galaxy phone, or control a phone camera’s shutter, using the same pinch gesture to take the picture. Neat stuff, although it does of course require a Galaxy phone to work. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to try this feature with a Galaxy phone during our brief tests.
Early Verdict: preaching to the converted
Is the Samsung Galaxy Ring good? Yes, is the answer. Will it dominate the emerging smart ring scene? Not quite, simply because its best features only work with Samsung phones. It might be cool enough to get a few people to switch from their preferred brands, but buying a new phone just so that you can then buy a $399 / £399 / AU$750 device on top of that is a big ask for most people.
Samsung users are going to get a real kick out of the Galaxy Ring if the promise of this tiny gadget can live up to a week of hard testing. Everyone else, however – including those who are committed users of the best iPhones – will be better off picking another ring, like an Oura or Ultrahuman. The Samsung Galaxy Ring is shaping up to be a very good wearable, but it’s not the One Ring to rule them all.
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matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
