(upbeat music) - 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 got it resized, I've had some existential thoughts, and at the end I have maybe a hot take on smart rings versus smartwatches. So, buckle up (upbeat music)
(camera shuttering) Smart rings, they've been
around for a while now. The Oura 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, seven days a week. It has a seven-day-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 millimeters 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 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 gonna say it's over counting a
lot of 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 10:00 pm one
day, more on that later, but it continued to show heart rate ranges all the way you can
see here until 03:00 am when I am definitely not wearing it. That's kind of weird. You know, I did that challenge a while ago of walking 1,000 steps in
a bunch of smartwatches and with a pedometer 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, you might've seen this right here. This thing is 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 ring itself. So, I bring this up because I totally did the size kit thing,
either with the wrong finger, 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. And so, I noticed that
because 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 smartwatches, which is that the back of the wrist is a horrible place to
measure any of this stuff. But yeah, the ring, 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 of 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 matte 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, I can't have anything on my hands. Like number one, ultimate Frisbee, a lot of throwing, a lot of catching. Golf, where the ring
again just doesn't work. And 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 workout stuff that I do. Now, I did keep the ring on for some other like lighter plyo 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. I 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
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out one for yourself, you can go to EightSleep.com/mkbhd and get 350 bucks off a Pod 4 Ultra or 200 bucks off a Pod 4. And with that money, you could 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 like the idea of it, but it's just not for me,
which is really too bad, 'cause 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 1.5 more times with its own built-in battery. So, 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 take a picture with a gesture with your Samsung
phone, which is hilarious. I don't think anyone's
gonna do that very often. But it also only works 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 Oura ring, or an Ultrahuman 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 subscription, 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 thing is all
about this 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 wideband 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 outta sight, then
yeah, you've got about as good a chance of finding
this as a regular ring, which yeah, is what did
actually end up happening to me. The other smaller ring that I was wearing before I got this one resized, at some point it fell off my wrist or hand and I just never found it. So, yeah, Samsung, if
you're watching this, sorry about that. Hopefully, I do find it at some point and I can ship it back to you. But that's my feature
request, along with hopefully, not giving me phantom heart rate readings till 03:00 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. (upbeat music)