The Samsung Galaxy Ring is a strong effort, but it's neither the best on the market nor cheap enough to be a compelling budget alternative
The Galaxy Ring is a good smart ring. In fact, it’s a really good smart ring – albeit one that errs on simplicity. It can track a workout, it’s great with sleep, and its Energy Score feels responsive and useful. But who we can recommend it to is more difficult. The Ultrahuman Ring Air and Oura Gen 3 are more interesting and insightful smart rings. The Galaxy Ring should tick boxes for users of Samsung smartwatches, but, at $399, it’s so hard to justify someone forking out for a device that does everything their smartwatch does already. It feels as if Samsung is testing the water here – both in terms of interest in the segment, but also the efficacy of its own technology. This is a great start, but feels like a missed opportunity to really take on Oura.
Pros
- Great sleep data
- Focus on actionable sleep coaching
- Energy Score feels intuitive
- Nice design and comfortable to wear
Cons
- Does cost less than rivals and Galaxy Watch
- Expensive (but no subscription required)
- Spotty HR data and poor SpO2
The Samsung Galaxy Ring marks the first entry from a major brand into the smart ring space – and sounds the starting gun on a new era of wearables.
While the Oura Gen 3 has been here longer – and does plenty of things better (read our updated review after two years of testing) – Samsung’s ring brings attention to what has been, until now, a niche space.
But smart rings are having a moment. Sports stars, including the England men’s soccer team, have taken to the technology for recovery, boosting the profile immensely.
They’re gaining interest from wearable tech users due to their long battery life and discreet design, too. People can enjoy powerful health-tracking insights without adding another screen to the wrist, enabling the continued use of smartwatches or traditional timepieces. Rings are also a much more comfortable option for sleep tracking.
But what sets the Samsung Galaxy Ring apart? What are its features, and is it worth purchasing? After a few weeks of testing, here’s what we found.
Price and competition
Right off the bat, we should note that the Galaxy Ring can only pair with Android phones.
If you have an iPhone, you’ll want to go and look at our Ultrahuman Ring Air or Oura Ring 3 reviews. Or check out our best smart rings guide for a full overview of the other top picks.
One might expect the Galaxy Ring to be competitively priced. However, it comes with a hefty tag of $399 – though there are no ongoing subscription fees to worry about. It also comes in a choice of black, silver, or gold.
The Oura Ring Gen 3, which is our top-rated smart ring pick, starts at $299 for its basic Heritage model but requires an ongoing subscription of $5.99 per month.
Then there’s the Ultrahuman Ring Air, which is comparable to the Samsung Galaxy Ring and costs $349/£329 – also without any subscription fees. The same is true for the highly regarded Ringconn, a startup that has just debuted its Gen 2 smart ring.
It means that the Galaxy Ring is a pricey choice. You would need to wear it for 16 months before it becomes cost-effective against an Oura Ring, and there are more feature-rich options for less.
Design and comfort
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is one of the most comfortable smart rings I’ve worn, featuring a slim and lightweight design. I prefer it to the Oura Ring Gen 3 in this respect.
However, it’s still not as discreet as a “proper” ring and looks chunky on the finger – and people will immediately notice you’re wearing a device on your hand – especially if you opt for black.
My only regret is not having the chance to try the gold version (shown on my finger below). I find it puzzling why brands often send out black rings for testing.
I wore the Galaxy Ring on my left index finger and the Oura Ring on my right for a few weeks, and the Galaxy Ring proved to be the more comfortable of the two. It’s slimmer, lighter, and more discreet.
The ring has a slightly concave shape, which is intended to prevent scratches. During the testing period, the surface of the ring remained scratch-free, though it did get scuffed on the side when using weights at the gym, and it’s a bit of a bummer that you need to take off your fitness ring to work out in the gym.
A small notch sits on the outer side of the ring, helping ensure that the sensors are correctly aligned under the finger for optimal performance. While the ring may rotate slightly, misaligning the sensor isn’t a major issue, and the notch serves as a useful visual guide to ensure the best accuracy.
Health metrics
Smart rings in 2024 are predominately about tracking your health – so this is the main focus of our review.
And when I say health, I really mean wellness. No ECG readings are being taken here, or alerts for abnormal heart rate rhythms. Instead, it’s about how you sleep, recover, and work out.
It’s also important to note that the Samsung Galaxy Ring doesn’t offer anything that the Samsung Galaxy Watch doesn’t. In fact, it provides fewer features than the Galaxy Watch 7.
In summary, the Galaxy Ring’s key health-tracking features include:
- Sleep tracking and coaching
- Galaxy AI insights (with Samsung smartphone)
- Energy Score
- Steps and activity monitoring
- Heart rate tracking and analysis
- Workout tracking and detection
- Stress detection
Sleep tracking
After its strong sleep-tracking performance on last year’s Galaxy Watch 6, and this year’s Galaxy Watch Ultra, I had high hopes for the Galaxy Ring – and it’s an excellent device for monitoring and improving sleep.
You get a summary each morning of the previous night’s sleep. Weirdly, Samsung emphasizes time spent in bed as a primary metric, with actual sleep duration displayed below. It’s slightly at odds with convention, yet also the single real thing you can control about your sleep, so it’s actually a smart choice.
Importantly, accuracy was generally in the right ballpark. It tended to track a little more generously than Whoop, but most nights sleep was within 10 minutes of the Oura Ring, which has been studied against gold-standard sleep tests.
Jump into your sleep score and you get a host of extra information, including sleep time, physical recovery, restfulness, mental recovery, and sleep stages – all individually rated by Samsung and its Galaxy AI coach.
It will also track blood oxygen during sleep, respiration rate, snoring, and skin temperature.
Samsung promotes sleep consistency prominently, which is an important metric that aims to ensure you sleep in tune with your circadian rhythm by going to bed and waking at the same time each day.
This aligns with the sleep animal chronotype, which the Galaxy Ring determines after seven nights of tracking. This helps you understand your habits, after which the training will work towards a goal based on your profile. It’s well thought through, individual, and smart.
While this is exactly the same as on a Galaxy Watch, the sleep tracking impressed me with its thoughtfulness and focus on the controllable aspects of sleep.
Samsung Energy Score
Accurate sleep tracking is essential because this metic feeds your Energy Score.
This uses HRV (heart rate variability), sleep data, and activity levels to offer a single score on your energy levels for the day.
It’s common among most wearables now – but, again, I was impressed by Samsung’s implementation. I found it in tune with my perceptions of how I felt, and it was reflected in my Energy Score when I felt tired or low on energy. There was one specific day in the office where I got good sleep, my Whoop recovery score was 80%+, and HRV was high – but I felt SO tired. And my Samsung Energy Score showed a lowly 60%, with advice to rest.
The Galaxy AI will also help you understand the score, offering advice on when to prioritize rest and reasons why your score might be low. In the example above, I’d done a strenuous workout in the heat the day before. The Galaxy AI pointed out that the previous day’s activity was an outlier, and I should take a rest.
It’s not all good, however. I did notice some weird step data from the Galaxy Ring. On a very busy Saturday, the Apple Watch Ultra tracked 22,000 steps, the Oura Ring Gen 3 tracked 26,000 but the Galaxy Ring just 16,000. So that certainly feels like an outlier.
Fitness performance
Smart rings generally aren’t ideal workout companions and have a complicated relationship with exercise.
The absence of a screen means it’s not designed for real-time feedback. And, actually, while the finger is a good place for heart rate at rest, it’s generally awful when it comes to running, where the extreme movement creates immense noise for the sensor.
As I mentioned earlier, I also scuffed the side of the Galaxy Ring during a single weights workout at the gym. So it’s not a great gym buddy, either.
If your goal is to get credit for your workouts within your Energy Score and activity metrics, though, the Galaxy Ring performs well.
For running, you can track your workouts if you bring your smartphone along to piggyback on its GPS data. Manually starting workouts in the Samsung Health app is recommended, and we got accurate distance, duration, and most importantly, fairly good heart rate data for the session.
Max HR was recorded at 171bpm on both the Galaxy Ring and a chest strap, while average HR was slightly out at 155bpm on the ring and 159bpm on the chest strap.
On another run using automatic workout detection, the max HR was 184bpm vs 185bpm but an average of 139bpm vs 170bpm for the session. Because I used automatic detection, the data included a large low heart rate section at the end while I recovered, which skewed the average. But actually, across the workout, the heart rate from the Galaxy Ring was in the right ballpark.
Using automatic workout detection will also mean distance is estimated. A 7.5km run was tracked as 7km, and a 12km run as 10km. So it’s best to use the smartphone to manually start a workout session, or you won’t get the best data recorded within the app.
I’m also not a fan of how Samsung stores workout data in a stream of automatically tracked walks, making it hard to find previous workouts. It’s also poor at offering workout trends or feedback on fitness data.
So while the HR performance exceeded expectations, and tracking was good overall – it still doesn’t feel like a good workout experience.
Heart rate data accuracy
One negative aspect of the Galaxy Ring is its lack of a baseline establishment for your body stats, which can make the data less personalized compared to devices like Oura and Whoop.
Oura, for instance, requires about two weeks of use before providing any data, as it first establishes what’s normal for you. Whoop also requires this, and much of its stats are presented in comparison to your normal range. This makes it feel intuitive.
In contrast, Samsung offers guidance and insights immediately, which can skew initial data, especially if you’re unwell or have had a particularly active weekend when you first start using the ring.
Heart rate performance outside of exercise was somewhat inconsistent, with generally accurate readings marred by occasional problematic data.
Overall, my resting heart rate aligned well with established baselines and tracked closely with my Whoop 4.0 and Oura Ring. While different devices have their own methods for determining resting heart rate, the key is that they follow similar trends.
Both Samsung and Whoop recorded my average resting heart rate at 46 bpm. Similarly, Samsung’s respiratory rate readings were closely matched with Oura’s, both averaging around 12.9 breaths per minute.
After a night out drinking on a Saturday, both devices registered a spike in resting heart rate, but Samsung’s reading was higher. Variations like these can occur depending on when and how the data is sampled, so while the exact numbers may differ, the overall trend was consistent.
However, there were some issues. On multiple occasions, I experienced significant gaps in heart rate tracking during sleep, including one instance where the data flatlined for an entire night. SpO2 data was also unreliable, with some nights showing drops into dangerously low blood oxygen levels while other wearables reported normal readings.
There are some quality control issues here for Samsung to work out, but the main thing was that it didn’t seem to affect the quality of the analysis.
Battery life
The seven days of battery life of the Samsung Galaxy Ring isn’t groundbreaking.
The new RingConn Gen 2 2 will last for 12 days between charges, which does make the week of Samsung and Oura seem wholly unspectacular. But, for users of the Galaxy Watch, seven full days will feel like a blessed relief.
In our tests, the ring typically lasted 5-6 days, with an average daily drop of around 15%, including full nights of sleep tracking. This is comparable to the Oura Ring, which also lasts about six days between charges in real-world testing.
One feature we appreciate is the Galaxy Ring’s charging case, a handy little box that allows for on-the-go charging or plugging into the mains.
On one occasion, I found the ring out of battery in the morning, placed it in the charging case, and managed to get around 40% charge during an hour-long commute.
