Samsung Galaxy Ring: design
Design is a tricky thing to get right for a smart ring. A good smart ring should be sleek, stylish, and comfortable. Given the small nature of smart rings, nailing all of those things is much easier said than done. Remarkably, Samsung appears to have had no trouble here.
The Galaxy Ring is made of titanium and is available in three finishes: black, silver, and gold. I’ve been wearing the black one in a size 9 (you have a choice between ring sizes 5 through 13), and I think it looks fantastic. It’s a darker shade of black compared to my Oura Ring in its Stealth color, and combined with the matte finish, it makes the Galaxy Ring look incredibly stealthy; I simply love it.
The Galaxy Ring is unbelievably comfortable. As someone who’s worn an Oura Ring off and on for a while, it was a bit shocking to discover how much thinner and lighter the Galaxy Ring feels compared to it. The Galaxy Ring measures an impressive 2.6mm thick and weighs just 3 grams, even at the largest size (13). The Oura Ring is about the same thickness (2.5mm), though it weighs between 4 and 6 grams, depending on the size you choose.
On paper, that doesn’t sound like much of a difference. However, wearing both the Galaxy Ring and Oura Ring side-by-side, the Galaxy Ring is noticeably lighter. And despite having the same thickness, it feels thinner, too. Part of this is due to the concave design, which gives the Galaxy Ring slightly raised edges with an intended middle. It’s subtle, but it’s a nice visual touch, and it should help prevent scratches throughout daily wear.
I really don’t have anything to complain about here. The Galaxy Ring is as good as it gets for smart ring hardware, and the fact that it’s Samsung’s first-generation ring makes it all the more impressive.
Samsung Galaxy Ring: sleep and activity tracking
OK, we’re off to a pretty good start! Samsung clearly got the hardware right; what about the Galaxy Ring’s sleep and activity tracking? Here’s where things get messy.
We’ll start with sleep tracking. The Galaxy Ring tracks a lot of data while you sleep, including your sleep stages, blood oxygen (SpO2), skin temperature, heart rate, and respiratory rate. Additionally, the Galaxy Ring also gives you a sleep score each night (on a 1-100 scale) based on your sleep time, restfulness, sleep cycles, physical recovery, and mental recovery. After your first few nights sleeping with the Galaxy Ring, you can also use the sleep coaching feature, which associates your sleep with a certain animal (I’m a lion, if you were wondering) with tips on how to further improve your sleep each night.
If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is! It could be easy to get overwhelmed with everything here, but I think Samsung does a great job of presenting this data in the Samsung Health app. If all you care about is your sleep score, you can quickly glance at that and move on with your day. But if you want more insightful data, it’s all there for you, with helpful explanations for everything.
As for the accuracy of the sleep tracking, it’s been (mostly) excellent. I wore the Galaxy Ring and Apple Watch Ultra 2 simultaneously to track my sleep for a few nights, and the Galaxy Ring consistently returned more accurate results. The Galaxy Ring did a much better job of recording accurate sleep and awake times, along with detecting a couple of instances where I woke up briefly in the middle of the night (which the Apple Watch didn’t catch). Further, your sleep quality and previous activity are used to generate an Energy Score at the start of each day, giving you a glanceable insight into how ready your body is to take on the day ahead.
The one thing I’ve been disappointed with is the Galaxy Ring’s blood oxygen accuracy. It often says my blood oxygen dips into the mid-to-low 80% range, and one night, it even said it was down to 75%. If those numbers were real, I would probably be in a hospital right now instead of writing this review. Comparatively, the lowest blood oxygen level my Apple Watch detected during the same period was 95%.
SpO2 levels don’t play into your sleep score, so they haven’t really impacted my sleep tracking in that regard. However, if you personally need to keep a close eye on your blood oxygen, I wouldn’t trust the Galaxy Ring one bit.
Next, we have activity tracking. Similar to Samsung smartwatches, your daily activity is recorded into three targets: motion, time, and calories. You can customize each of these, and I have my goals set to track my steps, active time, and activity calories. It’s a simple and easy-to-understand system that I think works very well. It’s very similar to how activity tracking works on the Apple Watch, and while it may not be the most original idea, it is effective.
The Samsung Health app allows you to manually track dozens of different workout types. (Open the app, select the workout type you want, and then tap the Start button.) Automatic workout detection is also present, though it’s limited to walking and running.
Automatic walking/running detection works as advertised. The Galaxy Ring consistently auto-tracked runs and walks throughout my time wearing it – including afternoon walks I take with my dog that the Apple Watch doesn’t detect. Which is great! But the accuracy of its workout tracking is, unfortunately, pretty bad.
On a 2-mile run, for example, the Galaxy Ring only thought that I ran 1.8 miles. It also gave me a much lower average heart rate of 127bpm, compared to 164bpm per my Apple Watch. It did an even worse job on a longer 4-mile run, recording just 3.20 miles and an average heart rate of 137bpm (versus the 181bpm on my Apple Watch). The Ring’s distance tracking fares a lot better if you bring your paired phone with it (which makes sense given the Galaxy Ring’s lack of GPS), but even then, it still returns other funky data – like saying I gained 250 feet of elevation on a weekend walk, wherein my Apple Watch (much more accurately) detected just 50 feet.
This all leaves me feeling pretty bad about the Galaxy Ring’s activity tracking. If all you want is something very casual – and you aren’t concerned about wonky exercise numbers – the Galaxy Ring fits the bill. But for a smart ring that costs $400, even without a subscription, it really should be doing more. I don’t need my smart ring to be the most robust activity/exercise tracker, but I do need to be able to trust the data it’s collecting. Right now, I just can’t do that with the Galaxy Ring.
Source: www.digitaltrends.com