The AI-powered smart ring is finally ready to be placed on your finger.
Samsung finally revealed the Galaxy Ring today at Unpacked, capping months of rumours. The new smart ring has an ordinary appearance—it’s a ring, after all—but beneath the glossy surface is a wearable that is crammed with fitness and health sensors.
In order to compete with the present market leader, the Oura Ring Gen-3, it must. Although Oura’s interoperability has always been a strength, the Galaxy Ring’s seamless connection with everything Samsung could be the secret to its success.
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is available in nine sizes and three colours (black, silver, and gold), with a retail price of $399. The battery is rated IP68, meaning it is water resistant for 30 minutes, and should last you a good week on a single charge.
Amazingly, for such a little device, it has an accelerometer, blood oxygen monitor, skin temperature sensor, and optical heart rate sensor. The real worth of the ring can be found in the Samsung Health app, which receives data from these.
It’s worthwhile to examine the hardware and what you get for your $400 before delving into the capabilities of the Galaxy Ring. With three colour possibilities and a weight of only 3g in the largest size, it’s rather lightweight. You can select a pattern that complements your taste and style.
However, there isn’t a direct way to interact with the data on the ring itself without a display, which is a feature seen on the majority of fitness trackers. Rather, the measurements connect through Bluetooth to your Samsung phone and show up in the Samsung Health app along with some practical, AI-powered insights that can be put to use.
We had a chance to play with the Galaxy Ring during Unpacked, but until we give it a thorough test, we won’t be able to say with certainty how all of the fitness and health aspects function. As of right now, though, the most notable fitness and health features of the Ring are its cycle tracking, workout recording, and sleep monitoring capabilities.
The Galaxy Ring, like most fitness trackers, uses an accelerometer to determine how much you walk around throughout the night, a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor to monitor your heart rate, and skin temperature sensors to track how much you sleep.
The Samsung Health app uses these measurements to create a sleep recording that shows you how well you slept each night. The Ring’s Energy Score, which provides a single measure based on your sleep, daily activities, and previous workouts, also heavily considers this.
However, the Galaxy Ring’s sleep data also influences some of its other health features, such as the Natural Cycles-powered period tracking and prediction feature. This is because sleep is crucial for general health.
The Oura’s ability to track your menstruation using skin temperature measurements is one of its most helpful functions. It is a stand-alone feature that determines when you are on your period based on temperature variations and requests confirmation through the app.
However, Natural Cycles, the FDA-approved period monitoring and fertility app, may also receive temperature data from Oura. Rumours circulated before to Unpacked suggesting that the Galaxy Ring will receive this feature as well, and it does, but in a unique way.
The temperature measurements from the Galaxy Ring are synced with Samsung Health, and the app tracks and forecasts your next period using technology from Natural Cycles. There are some areas in which this implementation differs from Oura’s.
You must pay $20 a month for both an Oura membership and a Natural Cycles subscription in order to use the more sophisticated Natural Cycles tracking feature with Oura. On the other hand, the Samsung Galaxy Ring counterpart does not require a membership.
However, there is a trade-off: while Samsung Health can assist with tracking your periods, it does not utilise all of Natural Cycles’ features, so you cannot use it for contraception or fertility planning like you can with the main Natural Cycles app.
The Galaxy Ring is a wearable fitness tracker, so it can track your daily activity and, once you start moving, recognise exercise automatically. Since there is no way to manually begin a workout on the ring, this is quite helpful.
Your measurements are pushed to the Samsung Health app, where they are used to inform all the new AI capabilities, such as the Energy Score, as well as other personalised insights about your recuperation, suggested daily activities, and dietary guidance.
We cannot say for sure how helpful these capabilities will be or how the Galaxy Ring will stack up against the Oura Ring until we have some focused time with it, but preliminary thoughts indicate that this might be the first smart ring to truly challenge Oura’s top spot.