Are rings the thing?

Smart rings are getting a lot of attention again, thanks to Samsung's newly announced Galaxy Ring. Others are likely launching soon and will be joining Oura, the long time market leader.

I am a fan of using metrics captured by sensors to monitor health and fitness. My go to device is my trusty Garmin Epix Gen 2. I have tried Apple's Watch Ultra, but in my experience, it doesn't quite cut it as an athletic watch.

I was therefore interested to see if a smart ring could add anything additional to my smartwatch experience. Circular provided an example of its relatively newly launched Ring Slim for me to try. It's amazingly light ~2g and, as the name suggests, slim ~2mm. There's a full review on our website - check the comments for a link - but here's my 30 second TL;DR.

A colleague of mine says that trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback. I used the word trusty for my Garmin watch because, while it's not perfect, I have come to know its foibles. I know when to believe the data it captures and when to question it. As such, I know I can rely on it to give me a decent sense of whether I am sufficiently recovered to train hard, or to take it easy. My concern with the Circular Ring Slim, is that I don't have the same level of trust in the data it is capturing, and if I can't trust the data, I therefore doubt the recommendations it makes. But if I didn't have a smartwatch, would it be a wearable option I would consider? Quite possibly, though with reservations.

Overall, smart rings provide a potentially useful device for discretely capturing data for processing in a partner app, and I believe that as technology advances, smart rings have the potential to become valuable tools for monitoring various aspects of our lives. For now, though, I will continue to explore other wearable options in the pursuit of better accuracy and reliability.