I have learned a lot about rings and about myself in the past week of testing the Galaxy ring it's been an adventure I've gotten resized I've had some existential thoughts and at the end I have maybe a hot take on Smart Rings versus smart watches so buckle [Applause] [Music] up smart Rings they've been around for a while now uh the AA ring came out like 10 years ago as a Kickstarter but the main point of these the whole advantage of it is you can wear it 24/7 24 hours a day 7 days a week it has a 7day long battery life so the whole idea is you just walk around like living life with a ring on like normal living eating sleeping showering swimming whatever just with a ring and that's honestly the most impressive thing about the smart ring to me is the fact that it gets so close in Dimensions to like a regular ring that some people would wear now keep in mind if you have smaller hands it'll look bigger but it's 2.6 mm thick so it kind of bulges Around Your Finger but aside from that it just looks normal it's not a tiny ring but I mean that it's still I'm impressed by how much Tech they shove into this tiny little frame and by Tech I mean a small battery and a couple pretty basic sensors but when you put it all together you get this all day activity tracker that you can kind of just put on at the beginning of the week and then forget about it not worry about the battery life just wear it every day every night and then just get a ton of valuable Insight on your health and sleep and energy levels at least that's the ideal use case now I have never worn a ring before so there's always some layer of like getting used to wearing something on your finger every day but then on top of that there are a couple other best practices like things you should know about wearing this one so first of all there is a correct way to wear it okay all the sensors are on the same side of the Ring lined up at the bottom with this little Notch so you're supposed to align All Those sensors with the Palm side of your hand for the best readings and then you're supposed to wear it on your index finger for the best results so apparently not actually on your ring finger so once you get this right you should have all the info showing up in the Samsung Health app this is calories burned steps taken how many miles you've covered and it all accumulates it together with this one energy score which is out of a 100 so I was wearing my Apple watch Ultra at the same exact time that I was testing the ring and so I'm looking at the numbers back and forth and it seems like the ring and the watch are way off from each other like the ring I'm just goingon to say it's over counting a lot of uh regular activity but then it didn't count nearly as many floors climbed for some reason so I don't know there's just there's a big Delta between these numbers and then I also at one point took the ring off for a while around 1 p.m. One Day More on that later but it continued to show heart rate ranges all the way you can see here until 3:00 a.m. when but I am definitely not wearing it that's kind of weird you know I did that challenge a while ago of walking a thousand steps in a bunch of smart watches and with a podometer and they were all within a few percent of each other so I think I lean towards trusting the watch over the ring numbers but that brings me to the importance of sizing because you only get one size you don't get to adjust it like you would with a watch right so uh you might have seen this right here this thing is a Samsung's ring sizing kit you can buy this on their site for 10 bucks and then you get a whole bunch of different plastic versions of the ring and they even have the Nubs on the inside for the sensors so you try a bunch of these on and you try to figure which one is the most snug but won't fall off and that'll be the size of the ring that you get and then you get 10 bucks off the The Ring itself so I bring this up because I totally did the size kit thing either with the wrong finger or I did something wrong because I ended up with a ring size 11 which it was a little too big when I got the actual ring uh and so I noticed that because it was It was kind of loose it didn't really feel comfortable all the time and then there would be like gaps in my sleep readings which probably just meant that it was like pushed off of my finger while I was asleep and it wasn't actually reading anything so I got a new size I got the size 10 and then it felt much better and by the way it turns out the index finger is a much better place to put like a heart rate monitor and other sorts of vitals sensors than the back of the wrist this is one of those weird Secrets or whatever that nobody really talks about with smartw watches which is that the back of the wrist is a horrible place to measure any of this stuff but yeah the ring that's that's where you should get that info now here's the thing that using this smart ring for a while actually taught me about myself all the benefits are still true like it's more wearable than a watch 24/7 definitely it's got that full week-long battery life it's legit you can basically forget you're wearing it after a few days in a row and have lots of ways to wear it out it's more versatile you don't have to dress it up or dress it down to match an outfit it's just a simple concave titanium design that looks good anywhere there's three colors gold silver or matte black so you already know this mte black one feels right at home I've just discovered that I'm not a big smart ring person myself that's just what it's come down to the main thing is the activities that I do that I care about the most uh I can't have anything on my hands like number one Ultimate Frisbee lot of throwing a lot of catching golf where the the ring again just doesn't work and uh weight training a lot of grip stuff just can't have a ring on so for each of those major workout activities I take the ring off which defeats the purpose of a fitness tracker that's supposed to know everything about my fitness when it's not tracking the most important workout stuff that I do now I did keep the ring on for some other like lighter Pio workouts and there is auto workout detection but with the lighter workouts like where you're not moving quickly and your heart rate doesn't Spike up super high then the auto workout detection didn't work super well at least for me and same thing for sleep tracking I had a couple of days on here where it thinks I actually didn't go to sleep until midnight when I was actually in bed earlier than that with the ring on it just didn't know and I can see the exact numbers because the smart mattress cover the eight sleep did pick up everything which is a great segue because this video is sponsored by Aid sleep so I was recently telling you guys how uh the two times better cooling performance was helping me actually sleep better and getting more 100 sleep scores which it still is but also the autopilot intelligence automatically adjusts the temperature throughout the night and the elevation on the ultra responding to sensor readings to find the optimal sleep conditions so altoe the Pod Forest Tech is clinically validated to increase Total Sleep Time by up to an hour every night and increase de sleep up to 2 and 1/2 hours a month and reduce wake up time by up to 3 hours per month and it's just as comfortable as the last gen so I kind of love it so if you want to check out one for yourself you can go to ad sleep.com MKBHD and get 350 bucks off a pod 4 ultra or 200 bucks off a pod 4 and with that money you could you can get a whole smart ring actually but anyway my point is if I am taking my ring off for my most important workout activities then this is not a great activity tracker for me clearly and even for my lighter workouts turned out the wrist thing that I have on that has a screen on it even though it's not the optimal place and it's not the optimal form factor to wear 24/7 I can tell it when I'm starting a workout and I can actually have it track the specific sets of time where I'm using it for a workout that I needed to know everything about so the ring I I like the idea of it but it's just not for me which is really too bad cuz I love the idea of it not distracting me with notifications it never vibrates it never makes any noise there's no speaker in it it's just this 24/7 Ultra minimal smart wearable with a stripped down feature set that you can wear for a week at a time like that's a sick idea and Samsung's made this nice little case for theirs that charges the ring inductively from the inside and has these clever little LEDs to indicate how much battery is left in the case and in the ring so it can charge the ring up to one and a half more times with its own built-in battery so it's just it's not meant to replace a smartwatch it's just a different offering of a product into the same ecosystem but that conveniently brings me to my last point which is they've leaned heavy into the ecosystem thing with the Galaxy ring so there are some specific Samsung only features where like you can dismiss an alarm or uh take a picture with a gesture with your Samsung phone which is hilarious I don't think anyone's going to do that very often but it also only works with with a Samsung Galaxy phone that's according to Samsung on their site so that the Galaxy Ring can only be paired to a Galaxy phone not any Android phone just a Samsung phone so I happen to be using a Samsung phone right now and that's fine and I can test it but if I was using a pixel or something else I don't see what would stop me from just picking up an aura ring or an ultra human ring or any of those others which basically have the same feature set but work with any Android phone other than this one not having a Subs description which actually is pretty sick so at the end of the day this ring is for people who already have a Samsung phone and who prefer the wearability of a ring over the functionality of something like a smartwatch because a smartwatch clearly is more functional but less wearable so this is this thing is all about the Simplicity which is probably a good time to mention the one feature that I wish the ring did have which is either like some sort of tiny speaker or maybe some Ultra wide band antenna or something like that something to make it easier to find if you lose it because if you do lose it well this is a really hard to find like there's a find my function in the app which I can tell you gives you the rough GPS location based on the last spot that it was connected to your phone and it can light up the LEDs on the inside that it uses to measure heart rate so if it's really dark maybe you'll see it visually but if it's not out somewhere invisible like if it's in a pocket or underneath something or out of sight then yeah you've got about as good a chance of finding this as a regular ring which uh yeah is what did actually end up happening to me the uh other smaller ring that I was wearing before I got this one resized I at some point it fell off my wrist or hand and I just never found it so yeah Samsung for watching this sorry about that uh hopefully I do find it at some point and I can ship it back to you but that's that's my feature request along with hopefully not giving me Phantom heart rate readings till 3: in the morning that's still kind of creepy anyway that's been it thanks for watching let me know what you think and I'll catch you guys in the next one peace [Music]