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Comfort7
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Design7.5
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Health tracking8.5
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Features7
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Durability6
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Value for money6
I have a weird relationship with smart health devices and wearables. The Apple Watch is the one that has been attached to my body for the longest time, but I rarely view the health metrics it produces.
I got bored of chasing my ring closures each day long ago.
This isn’t a fault of the Apple Watch (you can read about the latest Apple Watch Series 10 here) or of health devices in general – it’s all down to me. I have a vested interest in living a healthy lifestyle, and I’m the fittest I’ve ever been. I just don’t really care about the numbers.
A case in point: I’ve tried to get into the whole Whoop thing twice, and it just gets overwhelming – and uncomfortable – very quickly.
So, what about smart rings? I’ve worn the Ultrahuman Ring Air for months and kept forgetting to charge it, which essentially turned a very capable piece of wearable tech into a…ring.
Can the Samsung Galaxy Ring fare any better?
Galaxy Ring specs and design
The Samsung Galaxy Ring isn’t cheap. At £399, it’s actually pretty expensive, compared to the competition. Immediately, that means it needs to be as easy to live with as possible, and as beneficial for one’s health as it promises to be.
Buy one, and you’re sent a sizing kit first. This is standard practice for smart rings, and I’d advise anyone who’s considering buying one to switch between a couple of the sizes over the course of a week to account for hand swelling. Thank me later.
Once you get your shiny new Galaxy Ring, it’ll be made from titanium and in your chosen colour – either black, gold, or silver. I was sent the latter to review and it looks rather lovely. Inside, there’s Bluetooth 5.4, an 18mAh battery promising up to seven days of life, and three sensors – an accelerometer, heart rate sensor, and skin temperature sensor. The ring itself weighs just 2.3g and has IP68 water resistance.
There’s also 8MB of storage quoted on the spec sheet, which is cute (although pretty meaningless from the user’s perspective).
Read my Ultrahuman Ring AIR review
The Galaxy Ring is very comfortable to wear and looks great, in my opinion. There’s a slight curvature which makes it pretty recognisable, and a little raised dash to indicate where it should sit on your finger. That dash is another point of differentiation, design-wise, but it is a bit of a pain to keep adjusting the fit (although Samsung suggests that it’s not essential to have it in that position, in fairness).
The biggest win, design-wise, however, is the charging case. One of my biggest complaints about the Ultrahuman Ring Air is that it’s a pain to keep charged. Sure, the charging puck is small enough to chuck into your bag, but it still needs connecting to the mains. The Galaxy Ring’s case has a battery, which means it can charge the ring without being plugged in. It’s also got a handy battery level indicator for the ring and it’s still small enough not to bother the rest of the stuff in your bag. Job done.
More on the Apple Smart Ring release date
What can you do with the Galaxy Ring?
Those three sensors inside the Galaxy Ring help it track your steps, sleep, heart rate, stress, and a few other vitals. You can also enable cycle tracking, thanks to the skin temperature sensor.
In my testing, the stress and sleep tracking seem to be particularly accurate, although I’ve learned over the years with smart health devices that this is never an exact science; they all provide different results.
Everything is collated in the Samsung Health app. It’s just like any modern fitness app – there’s loads of detail if you want it, and simple numbers, bar graphs, and well-written text prompts if you just want the basics. There’s even a ‘sleep animal’, which I really do not understand, but is at least pretty cute. I’m a lion at the moment, in case you’re wondering.
Yeah, I have no idea, either.
The nice thing about Samsung Health is that, thanks to AI (or, if you read between the lines, simply a smart amalgamation of all the stuff the Galaxy Ring actively tracks), it generates an ‘Energy Score’, which is a single number that indicates your overall readiness for the day. It’s bordering on arbitrary, but it is at least a consistent way of sussing out how knackered or fresh you are – and why.
I’d also like to note that the Galaxy Ring is very good at automatically tracking workouts – particularly running. That means there’s no need to start and stop tracking when you’re working out, which is a rather lovely thing.
The problems with smart rings
There are a few issues with smart rings of which I think anyone who’s considering one needs to be aware.
They’re an acquired taste. I’m not used to wearing rings these days, so adding one to a non-wedding ring finger did look weird at first. It looked even weirder for my nearest and dearest, and my mates. It’s purely a matter of taste, of course, but given the fact you’re supposed to wear the thing all the time, you need to get used to it being part of you pretty quickly.
You can’t wear smart rings while undertaking weight workouts. Well, you can – no one is stopping you – but it will quickly resemble something that’s usually found at the bottom of a plumber’s toolkit if you do. They scratch up pretty easily, and while that might add character, the line between ‘character’ and ‘ruined’ is pretty thin, in my book.
They also scratch stuff. In fairness, I’ve not had any problems with the Galaxy Ring on that front thus far, but this might be because it’s resting on my middle finger as opposed to my index finger. Past experience with a smart ring on the latter left me with a scratched display on my orange S24 Ultra, a scratched car interior door handle, and, I’d guess, a trail of scratchy destruction in my wake of which I’m not aware.
The biggest issue with smart rings, however, is the fact that you’ll forget to charge yours all the time. Samsung has done a wonderful job with the charging case for the Galaxy Ring, but that doesn’t solve the inherent problem with the smart ring – it’s so light and inconspicuous that you forget you’re wearing it. And that means you forget to charge it – unless you check the numbers every day and keep an eye on the battery percentage in the app.
Which you won’t. On both accounts. Trust me.
This isn’t the fault of Samsung or any other manufacturer – it just indicates how hard you have to work at these rings to prevent them from just turning into… rings.
How the Galaxy Ring showed me the way
I won’t be deterred by my awful smart ring charging habits. As soon as the Galaxy Ring review unit dropped on my desk, I promised myself that I’d make a concerted effort to build it into my daily health and fitness routine.
During my testing of various smart health devices, I’ve realised that I very quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data on display. That’s what results in me ditching the device or, in a smart ring’s case, forgetting it’s actually attached to me.
Given how approachable Samsung Health is, and how dumbed-down the Energy Score is for people like yours truly, I’ve decided to focus on that number and my sleep score. That’s it. I’m happy with the amount of exercise I do, and, thankfully, don’t have any conditions that mean I need to keep an eye on specific metrics.
I’ve long wanted to improve my sleep quality, though. And that’s where the Galaxy Ring is, gradually, helping. It confirms when I’ve had a decent night (and, thus far, it’s been bang on the money) and the simple daily records show where I’ve slipped up and need to improve. It’s early days, but I’ve already found myself going into the health app far more now that I’ve lowered my expectations.
The problem is that I can already get all of this data from my Apple Watch – which brings me onto my inevitable conclusion about the Samsung Galaxy Ring.
Read my Apple watch S10 skin breakdown
Conclusion
It’s hard to give the Galaxy Ring a score higher than 3.5 stars today. That’s not because it’s a middle of the road product – it’s actually a brilliant piece of tech, and I’m enjoying wearing it. The score is simply because smart rings as a category are for such a niche audience and you really do have to buy one to figure out if it’ll work for you. And at £400, that’s an expensive punt.
Equally, just like every smart ring, its value is highly questionable if you’re already wearing a smartwatch. I swap smartwatches regularly, therefore the Galaxy Ring has at least become the one constant for my health tracking – you might be in a similar position.
If you’re not a smartwatch person, and you’re a Samsung or Android person who wants to track some key health metrics, I have a feeling you’ll like the Galaxy Ring. For everyone else, I’d stay tuned – I am treating this as a longer term test, after all!
Before you go
