Samsung Galaxy Ring

Samsung is helping to usher the relatively nascent category of smart rings into the mainstream with the Galaxy Ring ($399.99). The polished, lightweight, and durable design of this first-generation model makes it seem like the company has been making finger-based fitness trackers for years. With built-in sensors, the Galaxy Ring tracks your activity while you’re awake and the restfulness of your sleep, and uses Samsung's Galaxy AI to deliver a daily Energy Score to help you quickly gauge your readiness and personalized tips to improve your wellness. The Galaxy Ring is a stylish choice for health tracking if you have an Android phone, though its best features are reserved specifically for Samsung Galaxy handsets. For everyone else, the Oura Ring Generation 3 ($299.99, plus a $5.99 monthly membership) remains our Editors' Choice for its superior accuracy, wider phone compatibility, and lower up-front cost.

Design and Specs: A+ Aesthetics, With Power for Days

The Galaxy Ring requires a phone running at least Android 11 or newer, and you need a Samsung phone to access the full range of its features such as Galaxy AI insights. The Oura Ring, by contrast, offers much more flexibility with support for both Android and iOS.

While $100 more expensive than the Oura up front, the Galaxy Ring doesn't require a subscription for anything in its app. Most of Oura’s best features are gated behind a $5.99 monthly membership fee, which also includes guided meditations. Without a membership, the Oura Ring offers only basic health metrics and three simple daily scores (Activity, Readiness, and Sleep).

The Galaxy Ring comes in black, silver, or gold in sizes 5 through 13, but it runs small. Samsung provides a sizing kit for $10, which gives you $10 toward the cost of a ring. Samsung recommends wearing the Galaxy Ring on your index finger, if possible. I had to wear the biggest size on my ring finger for testing because it wouldn’t fit on my index or middle finger.

The Galaxy Ring's impeccable design extends to its look, feel, size, and even its case. I wore it for over a week, and it’s the most comfortable wearable I’ve ever tested. I regularly forgot I had it on. It’s small and light, measuring 0.28 inches wide and 0.10 inches thick and weighing between 0.08 and 0.11 ounces, depending on the size. For comparison, the Oura Ring measures 0.31 inches wide and 0.10 inches thick and weighs between 0.14 and 0.21 ounces. The more streamlined design of the Galaxy Ring is an advantage over the bulkier Oura.

The outside of the Galaxy Ring is smooth, with a slightly concave shape to the top. The bottom has a small notch meant to face your palm so you can easily make sure it's oriented correctly. The bottom of the interior holds the sensor notches and green and red LEDs that form a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor to detect blood circulation and oxygenation. Under the surface, the Galaxy Ring also has an accelerometer and a skin temperature sensor, forming a sensor trio that matches the Oura Ring Gen 3. It uses Bluetooth 5.4 to communicate with your phone.

Despite being small and light, the Galaxy Ring is durable. It’s made of Grade 5 titanium, has an IP68 rating for water and dust resistance rating, and a 10ATM water pressure rating, so it can survive in calm water up to 328 feet deep.

Battery capacity for the Galaxy Ring varies based on size, from 18mAh in the size 5 ring to 23mAh in the size 13. In our tests, the biggest size powered through 6.5 days on a charge, just shy of Samsung's seven-day maximum battery life estimate. At least with the biggest size, you’ll only have to charge it roughly once a week and can wear it consistently the rest of the time. The Oura Gen 3 similarly lasted about six days on a charge in our tests, while the Fitbit Charge 6 ($159.95), a wrist-based tracker, lasted four to five days between charges, depending on display settings.

Battery life is one huge advantage the Galaxy Ring offers over the company's flagship smartwatch, the $299.99 Galaxy Watch 7, which lasted just 22 hours with the always-on display enabled.

The Galaxy Ring ships with a cleverly designed translucent charging case that holds 361mAh battery capacity. The case can recharge the ring 1.5 times before needing to be plugged in. According to Samsung, the ring takes 80 minutes to fully recharge in the case, which matches my experience testing.

The ring's notches only allow it to fit in the charging case one way. With the ring in place, you can press the central button on the case, and a circular indicator light will show how much charge the ring has left. Without the ring in place, the same button will show the remaining charge in the case.

To quickly check the ring's battery status without pulling out your phone, just take it off your finger. The LEDs on the inside will blink green if the charge level is at least 15% or red if it is less than that.

Features: Holistic Health Tracking

While you’re awake, the Galaxy Ring tracks your activity, heart rate, menstrual cycle, steps, and stress. It can alert you via your phone if it senses a high or low heart rate, or if you’ve been inactive for a while. It tracks walks and runs automatically, and it can monitor your heart rate and workout duration for other exercises if you start tracking them from your phone. In comparison, the Oura Ring automatically tracks more than 40 different exercises.

While you sleep, the Galaxy Ring tracks blood oxygen, heart rate, nighttime movement, respiration, skin temperature, sleep latency, and sleep stages. With a nearby paired Samsung phone, it can also track snoring. It uses these metrics to gauge your sleep quality based on criteria like restfulness and physical and mental recovery to give you an overall sleep score.

The Galaxy Ring encompasses both your tracked activity and sleep in an AI-generated Energy Score updated daily. Presented as a single number on a scale from 0 to 100, the Energy Score is designed to offer a holistic sense of your overall well-being. An accompanying personalized wellness tip aims to help you improve your Energy Score and feel more energized from one day to the next. Oura has also been leveraging AI within its companion app via a beta feature called Oura Advisor that provides personalized health tips and holistic health assessments.

The Oura Ring offers some additional capabilities that are not available on the Galaxy Ring, like pregnancy insights and information on cardiovascular age. Still, for the most part, Samsung’s ring closely matches the Oura in features. That said, both fall short of the Fitbit Charge 6, which offers robust fitness and sleep tracking tools plus lifestyle features like Google Maps, Google Pay, Google Wallet, and YouTube Music.

As a fitness and health tracker, the Galaxy Ring lacks many of the features of the less expensive Galaxy Watch 7, including a built-in GPS and the ability to monitor for sleep apnea, take an ECG, and calculate your body fat percentage, not to mention lifestyle features like call capabilities, downloadable apps, and mobile payments. If you’re a big Samsung fan, you can get both devices and the Galaxy Ring will work with the Watch 7 or the Galaxy Watch Ultra to gather data, extending the ring's battery life by 30%, the company says. For this review, I paired the ring with a Galaxy Z Flip 6 and didn't wear a Samsung smartwatch at the same time.

Setup and Apps: A Slick Experience

Pairing the Galaxy Ring with my Samsung phone was easy, and the setup process took less than five minutes. The ring comes in the included case, and the box also contains a USB-C charging cord but no wall brick.

Open the case with the ring inside to put it into pairing mode. A window should then pop up on your Android phone, prompting you to connect to the ring. If you don’t see this pop-up, close and open the case again, and then use your phone’s Bluetooth menu if you still don’t see it.

To complete the connection, you need to sign in to the Galaxy Wearable app on your phone. It’ll walk you through various permissions and agreements. You’ll need to allow precise location tracking all the time to enable your phone to find the ring, then it’ll finish pairing and walk you through setting up your daily activity targets and show you various tips and tricks for using the ring.

I turned on its advanced sleep metrics: blood oxygen, skin temperature, and snore detection. I also enabled high and low heart rate alerts (I skipped the feature to predict your menstrual cycle). For notifications like low heart rate or battery alerts, the ring doesn’t have any built-in speakers and it can’t vibrate, so its only means of notifying you is via a push notification to your phone.

If you decide to pair it with a new phone, you can put the ring back in the case and press the button for three seconds to put it back into pairing mode.

Once connected, you can use the Galaxy Wearable app to adjust settings like the thresholds for inactive alerts and high and low heart rate alerts. The app also gives you the option to enable gestures that let you pinch your finger and thumb together twice to take a picture with your phone or dismiss an alarm. Like the AI features, this gesture control is also dependent on you having a Samsung phone specifically. A handy feature in the Galaxy Wearable app called Find My Ring can help you locate the tiny wearable if it gets lost by showing its location on a map and illuminating the LEDs on the watch.

The Galaxy Wearable app has a picture of the ring at the top with a battery percentage below it. Beneath that, you’ll find buttons for Energy Score, Sleep, and Heart Rate, but these all take you to the relevant section of a separate app, Samsung Health.

The Samsung Health app is where you’ll find the data that your watch captures. I dislike needing to use two different apps, but the Health app is nicely organized and makes it easy to find and contextualize your tracked info. Energy Score and wellness tips populate at the top. Scroll down for activity, cycle tracking, heart rate, sleep, steps, stress, workouts, and more. Tap any individual tile for more details. Within the tile, you can also initiate a reading for metrics like heart rate and stress. Tap the menu button in the upper right to change which cards are shown and in which order. Tabs at the bottom let you browse fitness videos, share your progress with friends, and edit your personal profile.

Activity Tracking: Not the Best

To gauge the accuracy of its heart rate measurements, I took the Galaxy Ring for a run while also wearing an Apple Watch Ultra 2. The ring automatically tracked the workout and correctly calculated both the duration and distance traveled, but I was mildly insulted to see that it called the activity a walk instead of a run. To be fair, I ran slowly and did some intervals with sprinting mixed with actual walking toward the end of my 30-minute workout, but I was distinctly jogging most of the time.

Nevertheless, the ring's heart rate numbers mostly matched those of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and correctly showed spikes in the graphs that aligned with my sprinting intervals. Its values for both average and max heart rate skewed a little low, with average heart rate 10 beats per minute (bpm) below Apple’s and max heart rate down by 5bpm. That said, I manually stopped tracking the workout on the Apple Watch as I was cooling down near my home, and the Galaxy Ring kept recording the exercise for roughly an extra minute, so the deviation in averages is understandable. The ring's numbers from moment to moment were also lower than those of the Ultra 2, but usually not by a substantial amount.

While running, the Galaxy Ring also tracks your cadence, calories burned, heart rate zones, pace, speed, and steps. For my 30-minute test run, its cadence numbers matched those from the Ultra 2. However, the Galaxy Ring doesn't offer the detailed running form metrics you get from the Galaxy Watch 7 or the Apple Watch, such as ground contact time and vertical oscillation. Since it doesn't have a GPS, it won't display a map of your route after an outdoor run.

Throughout testing, the Galaxy Ring’s step count showed some inaccuracies compared with both the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and the OnePlus Watch 2R (which I’m also testing for an upcoming review). On two days out of four, its step counts lined up within a couple hundred of the Apple and OnePlus smartwatches, which is a reasonable margin of error. On the other two days, the Galaxy Ring showed a step count that was more than 1,000 steps higher than the other devices.

Helpful AI Health Insights

The Galaxy Ring's step count and heart rate measurements were at least reasonable enough to get a general sense of my activity, and I enjoyed checking my daily Energy Score and wellness tip. After a lousy night’s sleep a different night, my score was a low 58, which it categorized as Needs Attention. Before that, I had been on a roll with good sleep and exercise and received Good scores of 82 and 83.

One day, it showed a Fair score of 63, and the wellness tip revealed that my sleeping heart rate variability was high. It advised stress-relieving activities like hobbies and meditation for the day. Some of the wellness advice is obvious, like getting more sleep, but other aspects are tailored to your metrics, like when it encouraged me to get a specific amount of light exercise. Most of Samsung's AI insights were anecdotally accurate, if not helpful.

The Energy Score metric reminds me of Garmin's common Body Battery metric, available on many of the brand's devices, including the Lily 2 and the Vivoactive 5. Garmin's metric updates throughout the day instead of just showing a static number, which I prefer, but the Samsung Energy Score is still helpful, and wearing the ring is a more comfortable way to get it than the Watch 7.

Solid Sleep Tracking

Sleep quality and quantity weigh heavily in your Energy Score, and the Galaxy Ring proved mostly accurate when assessing my shut-eye. The Samsung Health app shows a specific sleep score, and tapping into this tile pulls up details including duration, a breakdown of your sleep score factors, a chart of your sleep stages, blood oxygen during sleep, snoring, skin temperature during sleep, heart rate, respiratory rate, and sleep consistency.

The Galaxy Ring's sleep duration measurements mostly matched those of the Apple Watch Ultra 2, the OnePlus 2R, and the Nest Hub. Samsung would occasionally give me credit for less deep sleep and more REM sleep than the others, but the stage charts looked more or less the same within an acceptable margin of error.

On one night, the Galaxy Ring said I was in a waking state of sleep from 4 a.m. until 7 a.m. and gave me credit for a few hours less than the others as a result. This led to an Energy Score of 58, and while I did toss and turn a bit that night, my sleep wasn’t that bad. The other devices noted the restlessness but painted a picture more accurate to my experience. I was still asleep during those hours, just in a lighter, fitful state.

On another night, the Galaxy Ring showed a gap in its collected sleep data, a problem I also experienced when testing the Galaxy Watch 7 and the Galaxy Watch Ultra. This only occurred once during my week of testing the ring, and its sleep assessments for the evening otherwise seemed accurate.

In terms of other health metrics, the Galaxy Ring's overnight respiration and skin temperature values matched those of the other devices. Its resting heart rate numbers were slightly high but stayed within the 5bpm to 10bpm range of the other wearables.

The only overnight health stat from the Galaxy Ring that looked consistently off was blood oxygen saturation (SpO2). It measured my average SpO2 between 100% and 74%, the latter of which is a dangerously low value. A healthy range for adults should be above 95%. The OnePlus 2R put my nightly range between 99% and 93% during the same time period and given that I didn't have to go to the hospital, the OnePlus numbers seem far more accurate.

Verdict: A Compelling Oura Alternative for Samsung Fans

Aside from occasional anomalies, the Samsung Galaxy Ring accurately tracks a wide range of sleep metrics and enough activity stats to provide a good sense of your general well-being. We also appreciate its personalized AI recommendations to help you improve your fitness and health. If you have a Samsung phone and want a holistic health tracker with a focus on sleep, the Galaxy Ring will serve you well, and its stellar design and long battery life are sure to please. That said, we generally prefer the platform-agnostic Oura Ring Generation 3, which costs $100 less up front and measures more metrics with greater accuracy than the Galaxy Ring. If you're not set on a smart ring, meanwhile, the wrist-worn Fitbit Charge 6 offers all the capabilities of the Galaxy Ring and more, with similar battery life, for around half the price.