Should you ditch your fitness tracker for the Samsung Galaxy Ring?
Once a niche gadget reserved for wellness geeks, the smart ring has hit the mainstream in 2024. Countless celebs and athletes – including Jennifer Aniston, Miranda Kerr, Prince Harry and the entire England football squad no less – have been spotted wearing the market-leading Oura Ring, while brands such as Amazfit and Ultrahuman have launched their own discreet designs.
Now, Samsung has also thrown its hat into the ring (sorry), with its own miniature wearable, and it comes with high expectations.
To find out if it lives up to the hype and to see how it compares to the Oura Ring, our health and wellness experts at the Good Housekeeping Institute put it through rigorous testing in and out of the lab. Read on for everything you need to know about Samsung's hottest new launch...
What is the Samsung Galaxy Ring?
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is a wearable health tracker that looks and feels like a piece of jewellery. Like the Oura Ring, it’s a lot smaller and sleeker than a standard fitness watch, making it a comfy, convenient alternative for those who don’t enjoy wearing screens on their wrists.
It comes with three tiny sensors to track your sleep and activity levels, as well as monitor your heart rate, skin temperature and menstrual cycle. It then uses AI technology to provide a daily ‘energy score’ and offers a host of personalised insights to help you optimise your overall wellness. It will send an alert if your heart rate is too low or too high; it can detect sleep apnea (a condition where your breathing is interrupted during sleep; and can automatically track your workouts.
At £399, it is slightly more expensive than the Oura Ring 4, which currently costs £349. However, unlike its main competitor, it works on a subscription-free model, so none of your data is hidden behind a paywall and you don’t need to set up yet another direct debit alongside Netflix.
Got an iPhone? The Samsung Galaxy Ring is only compatible with Android devices, so if you're an Apple user on the hunt for a smart ring, then Oura is your best best.
How we tested the Samsung Galaxy Ring
Our in-house fitness expert tested the Samsung Galaxy Ring over a few weeks, wearing it consistently throughout the day and overnight. They judged it on the following criteria.
Set-up and ease of use: They considered how simple the ring was to set up, whether the instructions were easy to follow and if the accompanying Samsung Health app was intuitive to use. They also noted whether the charging process was straightforward.
Design and comfort: They assessed the overall design of the product, assessing how comfortable it was to wear in different scenarios, whether it interfered with daily activity and how aesthetically pleasing it was.
Performance: Scores were awarded based on the ring’s health, sleep, activity, stress and menstrual tracking capabilities, as well as how easy the data was to understand and interpret. We used an Sp02 monitor and a heart rate monitor to check accuracy.
The GHI’s Samsung Galaxy Ring review
Overall score: 74/100
Design
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is made from titanium, known for its strength and durability, and comes in three colours: black, silver and, our personal favourite, gold. Weighing between 2.3-3g depending on the size, it’s a little lighter than the Oura Ring 4, which comes in between 3.3-5.2g. The concave design means it’s slimmer, too.
For comfort and accuracy, finding the right size is key. The fit should be snug enough to collect your biometric data, but you should still be able to get the ring on and off easily. To help you figure out which one to go for, the brand offers a sizing kit, with nine plastic rings ranging from size 5 to 13 – the idea is to wear your chosen dummy ring for at least 24 hours to account for swelling overnight. Once you’re happy, you can proceed with your purchase.
Our expert praised the “stylish, low-profile look”. They barely noticed it as they went about their day and raved about how easy it was to wear.
According to Samsung, the concave design will protect the ring from scratches and marks and sure enough, it held up extremely well during testing. However, our expert said the ring affected their grip slightly when lifting weights, so you may want to take it off when you’re in the gym.
It's waterproof up to 100m, so you can happily wear it in the shower or pool but, unlike the Oura Ring, it’s not suitable for extreme temperatures like saunas and steam rooms.
Battery life
Classic smart watches run out of juice pretty quickly (my Apple watch, for instance, needs charging every single day) but the absence of a screen and constant notifications means smart rings tend to have a lengthier battery life.
The Samsung Galaxy Ring offers up to seven days straight on a single charge, and it takes just 90 minutes to recharge fully.
Our expert confirmed that the battery was long-lasting and found it extremely easy and convenient to charge; you simply pop the ring into the transparent charging case with a USB-C cable. The case has LED lights around the edge so you can keep track of the battery level, plus it holds up to 1.5 charges. Here, it does better than Oura as its charging dock only shows you if the battery is full or not, plus it can be all too easy to knock the ring off the open base.
Set-up and ease-of-use
Setting up the ring took less than five minutes in total. Just turn your Bluetooth on and pair the ring with your phone using the Galaxy Wearable app. Then, input your data, create your daily targets and choose which health metrics you want to track and receive alerts for. There are useful prompts and tips to guide you through the process.
You can also set up an extremely handy ‘Find My Ring’ feature to help you locate the tiny piece of jewellery when you’ve left it lying around the house. It will reveal its location on a map using the Samsung Find app, and the LED lights will start flashing so you can see it easily.
We also found the Samsung Health app a pleasure to navigate and use. The home screen displays your key stats, including activity, heart rate, sleep and stress, with the option to customise it to suit your preferences. For instance, you may want to include metrics on your menstrual cycle, blood pressure or body composition.
You can then click through to learn more about your sleep, stress and energy levels. Data is presented using colour-coded, graphs, charts and scores, which are easy to read and digest.
Sleep tracking
Like Oura, the Samsung Ring provides an overall ‘sleep score’ based on the quality of your slumber, and gives you a rating from ‘needs attention’ to ‘excellent’.
Each morning, you can review all your data from the night before, including overall sleep duration, restfulness, physical and mental recovery, and sleep cycles. You can see how long you spent in different sleep stages (including REM and deep sleep), check your blood oxygen level and heart rate, plus you can even track your snoring if you keep your phone beside your bed. This can be helpful for identifying conditions such as sleep apnoea.
After seven days of consistent sleep monitoring, Samsung’s AI-powered sleep coach will assign you a ‘sleep animal’ based on your individual routine, and provide a host of insights and tips to help you form healthier habits.
Our expert said it did a good job of sleep tracking on the whole, accurately identifying sleep and wake-up times. They did have a few issues with sleep stages, however – the ring identified their ‘awake time’ as ‘light sleep’ on a few occasions.
You also get an ‘energy score’ which takes in factors like your sleep, heart rate and how active you were the previous day, to help you gauge whether to take it easy or tackle the day with gusto. If you get a low score, it will offer suggestions on how to minimise stress, get your body moving or wind down before bed.
Activity tracking
Like your typical fitness tracker, it tracks your heart rate and steps, and provides automatic workout detection for walking and running. You do need to manually log some activities (there are 13 in total to choose from) like weight training and cycling within the app, however.
Post-workout stats reveal the basics: average heart rate, calories burned and duration, but for running, it also provides data on your pace, speed, cadence and even heart zones – our expert was a big fan of this last feature. You can also set calorie and distance goals, with the option to race against your previous results.
Our tester did experience a few issues with accuracy in terms of distance, but they found the auto-detect feature worked extremely well. They also appreciated the useful summaries of your overall daily activity to help you stay on track and meet your goals. Not dissimilar to Apple’s movement rings, there are three coloured lines to represent your steps, active time and calories – as you work towards your daily target, the lines will progress to form a heart. According to our expert, this was highly motivating.
Menstrual cycle tracking
The Samsung Galaxy Ring uses biometric data like skin temperature and sleep patterns to deliver insights into your menstrual health. It’s powered by the FDA-approved cycle tracking app, Natural Cycles, so it can track your cycle and predict your next one.
Within the Samsung Health app, you can also log your period, document any symptoms you might be experiencing (like cramps and mood changes) and keep taps on the status of your cycle. It’s worth noting, however, that the ring doesn’t offer all the features that come with a Natural Cycles subscription. For instance, you can’t use it as a means of contraception or to track your fertility.
Compatibility
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is compatible with any android device, but unfortunately, it won’t work with an iPhone (yet). Dedicated Samsung Galaxy users also get a more souped-up experience, with access to features like the energy score, AI-powered wellness tips, Find My Ring and gesture controls, which allow you to control your phone camera or dismiss an alarm with a double pinch gesture.
Unlike Oura, Samsung doesn’t consider the ring to be a standalone bit of kit, but notes it works best with other devices within the Galaxy ecosystem. Wearing the ring alongside a Galaxy watch can extend its battery life by up to 30% according to the tech giant.
The verdict: Is the Samsung Galaxy Ring worth it?
For dedicated Samsung users, that's a resounding yes. There’s lots to love about the tech giant's first foray into smart rings, not least because it swerves a monthly subscription fee, unlike Oura. The lightweight device scored highly for design, durability and comfort, making it a worthwhile choice if you don’t enjoy the sensation of a clunky tracker strapped to your wrist.
There were some issues with accuracy but overall, it put in a solid performance – the data screens were responsive and simple to interpret, the health and sleep stats were insightful, and we appreciated the AI-powered wellness tips, which were genuinely useful and encouraged us to make small but meaningful lifestyle changes.
Activity tracking is limited when you compare it to Oura, which offers 40 trackable workouts over Samsung’s 13. But, if you wear the ring in tandem with a Galaxy watch, you’ll get all your detailed fitness metrics on there anyway. The Oura Ring 4 also has an additional infrared sensor to help with accuracy when it's not aligned on your finger properly, and it offers advanced metrics like cardiovascular age.
Overall, Oura still has the edge in the smart ring space, but if you’re already integrated into the Samsung ecosystem, then the next-gen wearable has plenty to offer.
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is available to buy from Samsung and John Lewis.
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