I’ve been using a smart watch since the original Apple Watch released almost a decade ago, and have increasingly loved tracking health related metrics ranging from steps when the original launched all the way to recently releases which have brought the likes of bloody oxygen and sleep tracking.
There’s no way around the fact that smart watches only mostly last 24 hours, which makes them hard to charge if you want the full 24/7 health tracking experience and there’s also the fact that some people don’t feel comfortable sleeping with watches or like wearing them at all, and that’s where smart rings have come into the fold and been really popular, with Samsung being the first major smartphone brand to get into the market.
Whilst smart rings are a much more discreet and comfortable experience than a smart watch, they do require the ring to be tightly snug around the finger that you choose (any is fine) which means that you start off by ordering a sizing kit to choose between the 9 available sizes, and I recommend wearing this for a good 24 hours as the size of your finger changes when you sleep, your temperature and just generally throughout the day.
You can wear the ring on any finger. Samsung says that you should wear it on your fore finger if you want the most accurate gesture controls (something I didn’t get to test), but as far as accuracy goes for health purposes, it’s supposed to be almost identical on any finger, so I chose to wear it on my index finger, as I find it doesn’t get in the way there.
The Galaxy Ring has a really nice design with a titanium finish that comes in a matte black, a gold and a silver, all which are really nice, but I’ve already got a slim gold wedding band on my left hand, so I opted to go with the black version which is really nice. Something that I absolutely love compared to the Ultra Human ring that I’d tested perviously is the charging case, which is much more similar to that of a traditional ring.
It’s really futuristic with its clear design and it has an LED around the ring that shows the charge of the ring as well as the case itself, which has enough charge to charge the ring wirelessly 1.5x with the actual ring itself having about 7 days of charge with sleep tracking and a moderate amount of exercise tracking. The case takes about an hour to charge the ring from dead to 100% and the case can be charged by USB-C or through QI charging, which is a touch that I absolutely loved.
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is only compatible with Android devices, which is a bit of a shame, as I think there’d be a huge market for Apple users (me included) and I can’t see Apple jumping into this space anytime soon. It pairs to Android really seamlessly with the Samsung Wearables app which is also what you can use to check battery life and update firmware, but where you’ll spend most of your time is in the Samsung Health app, which is fairly simplistic but does a fairly decent job of showing you all the important health info from your Galaxy Ring.
The Galaxy Ring will automatically track your sleep measuring how much time you spent in each sleep zone, your heart rate whilst sleeping, your bloody oxygen as well as how many times you woke up and wiggled around. I measured alongside a few other wearables and it was fairly one-to-one giving me confidence that it was doing a good job. There’s also some advanced measurements for skin temperature during sleeping as well as snore detection as well.
THE CHEAPEST PRICE: $699 WITH FRE SHIPPING
The Galaxy Ring also measures your heart rate both automatically throughout the day and on demand through the app, measuring your resting heart rate as well if there were any high or low alerts as well, giving you a good amount of confidence in how consistent your heart rate is.
The thing I was most excited to test was the auto detecting workouts and whilst I’m not the most active person, I walk at least twice a day with my two sausage dogs, and the Galaxy Ring did an almost perfect job at tracking each of these walks, which is important as there’s no screen on the Ring and you want to know that it’s tracking each bit of activity even if it’s only a small walk.
The other thing that the Galaxy Health app does is pull in all of your sleep measurements as well as your pervious activity to give you an Energy Score which should hopefully match up with how you’re feeling as you go to tackle your day. Whilst it’s probably not going to be life changing, it absolutely makes you more aware of how much you’re looking after yourself, which is really what all of these things are designed to do.
It’s fascinating to think how much Wearables have changed our lives over the last 10 years, and I do think that the Samsung Galaxy Ring is a great step forward, as I think that most people wear a smart watch to track activity and sleep metrics and less-so for the display and computing elements, so to have this available in a much more discreet piece of jewellery that lasts almost 7 times as long is a big win.