Samsung Galaxy Ring: HandsOn With The GameChanging New Wearable
Samsung has announced that it is waiting to release a new device: the Samsung Galaxy Ring. You can guess a little about it from its name (like it's round and fits on your finger), but not much is known about it.
Shortly after it was announced in January, I was able to check it out, try it out, and ask a lot of questions about it. Here's what I learned.
"First of all, nothing has been done yet," the doctor warned me. Azizi Pak, Head of Digital Health Group, Samsung Electronics. The design of the rings that I tried on my finger can vary beyond recognition with different shapes, different colors and different materials. So think of them as prototypes.
Look and feel
The rings I saw and felt came in a variety of colors and styles, including shiny gold and subtle black colors. I was told that the ring is made of titanium, which explains why it is so light. It felt as heavy as the Aura ring I wear every day, and it weighed 0.14 ounces, or 4 grams, so it felt in the same ballpark. This is important: one of the key features of a smart ring is that it should be easy and unobtrusive to wear at night, so people who find it too difficult to wear a smart watch at night can track their measurements.
This is part of Samsung's mission. Like Dr. "As you can imagine, especially a ring, the wearer is only as good as the people who wear it," explains Buck. It doesn't matter if people don't wear it.
The design was simple but unique - at least for the time being - with a gently sloping channel running around the outside. I feel comfortable. So good, in fact, that I think I could play the flute with my finger instead of sticking my thumb into the opening of my halo ring. With the Aura, it has the added benefit of allowing me to keep the ring on my finger. The Galaxy Ring prototype does not have the same anchor.
The channel looks better and less noisy than it looks in the picture, just like we saw during the introduction.
Features
Samsung didn't say exactly what metrics the ring measures. Sleep monitoring appears to be a given, and perhaps blood oxygen monitoring as well. Korea's Food and Drug Administration has approved Samsung's sleep apnea monitoring technologies, a potential target for Ring.
Doctor. Buck said that while he can't say how many readings per hour he'll get through the Bzel, the readings on the Galaxy Watch are comparable in accuracy to what the Galaxy Watch is capable of.
Samsung is serious about monitoring our health in detail. Doctor. "The general trend in wearables is that what was on demand is becoming more passive and measured in the background," Buck says. "And when that happens in so many ways, there's going to be a lot of patterns that emerge that we don't." More clear. "What's happening is that wearables are giving us context in ways we never knew before."
The official date
Samsung's official statement says that it will be this year itself. Answer to the question: will it be the first half or the second half? The answer was yes. Seriously Dr. Buck said this could happen in the second half of 2024. No information was provided on the price.
You can also read an in-depth review of the Galaxy Ring by Johnny McGregor on Forbes here.