Samsung Galaxy Ring Review 2026

Samsung’s Galaxy Ring, released in April 2024, marks the brand’s first entry into the smart ring market, offering a slim titanium design, solid battery life, and seamless integration with the Galaxy ecosystem.

After wearing it for two months, I can attest that it’s a comfortable, minimalist, well-made ring that nails the basics and has a few clever touches. However, when it comes to health insights and fitness tracking, it feels more like a companion to the Galaxy Watch than a true rival to category leaders like the Oura Ring 4.

Here’s everything the Galaxy Ring gets right and where it falls short.

What I like

It’s thinner and better-looking than most smart rings.

While most other smart rings look relatively the same, the Samsung Galaxy Ring features a thinner and more compact design. At 7.0mm wide, it’s slimmer than Oura and Ultrahuman (typically 7.9-8.1mm) and is made from titanium, which keeps it both lightweight and durable. Samsung smartly gave this ring a concave center, which helps minimize scratches. After three months of wearing it, it’s significantly less marked up than my Oura or Ultrahuman ring.

The ring comes in four finish options — titanium black, silver, gold, and two-tone — and nine sizes (a free sizing kit will help you pick the right size). Overall, it’s the most understated smart ring I’ve tested.

There’s no monthly fee.

The Samsung Galaxy Ring costs around $50 more than similar smart rings, such as the Oura Ring 4. But unlike Oura, which requires a $6 a month subscription, all of Samsung’s insights are included free with the purchase. That alone is a solid selling point for many people, especially those who are already using Samsung Health.

The battery and case are both impressive.

The Galaxy Ring lasts up to seven days on a single charge — just long enough to avoid frustration, I found. But what really sets it apart is the charging case: It resembles a jewelry box, holds its own charge, and can charge the ring up to 1.5 times without needing to be plugged into the wall. This is a dream for traveling — the ring stays secure inside the closed case, and you can skip packing a cord entirely if your trip is under 10 days.

I also appreciated being able to toss the charging case in my bag and top off the ring wherever I went instead of leaving it plugged in on a stand, forgetting about it for hours, and losing precious steps and sleep data in the process.

The daily insights are helpful, but somewhat surface-level.

Samsung Health generates an “energy score” each morning based on sleep quality, previous day’s activity, and heart rate data from your ring. I appreciated the summary when my score was low — the app suggested light movement and recovery-focused choices rather than pushing me to do another workout. It also consolidates your steps, active time, and calorie burn in a helpful, color-coded graphic shaped like a heart; I found this to be a nice, intuitive visual where I could see my health stats at a glance to know if I needed to get out more today.

That said, the health insights did feel a bit light. The Samsung Galaxy Ring doesn’t offer the more complex applications of your biometrics that other wearables do — features like a comprehensive “readiness” score or small spikes in skin temperature for early illness detection.

It has special perks for Galaxy Phone users.

One of the coolest features of the Galaxy Ring that I have yet to see on a smart ring is its “gestures” feature. By making a double-tap pinching gesture with your ring-worn finger and thumb, you can take a picture with your camera or dismiss your alarm. As someone who takes a lot of selfies and outfit pics, this is a small but powerful pro to the ring.

It’s comfortable enough to wear 24/7 — which is key.

Throughout testing, I never found the ring to be uncomfortable. It doesn’t trap water after a shower, it doesn’t twist around too much (there’s a helpful raised indentation marking where it ideally sits on your finger), and its thinner width means it stacks well against surrounding rings on your hand.

My one small gripe is that there were a handful of times I rolled over in the middle of the night and was mildly blinded by green lights from the sensors under the ring. This isn’t a dealbreaker, though, especially considering it happened with every smart ring I tested (and sometimes with the smart watches as well).

Where it falls short

Fitness tracking is very basic.

I love that the Samsung Galaxy Ring autodetects walks. However, my biggest issue with the device is that it only detects walking and running — nothing else. There is no auto-tracking for strength training, yoga, Pilates, pickleball, or even cycling.

In turn, the Samsung Health data dramatically underestimates your calorie burn and daily activity total. For example, this morning I did an intensive, 75-minute strength workout; my Fitbit said I burned 374 calories, but my Samsung Galaxy Ring said I only burned 71 calories and that I’ve only had 32 minutes of active time today (because it only counted the walking between sets and to and from the gym). This directly influences my energy score for the day

You can manually go in and start a workout, or add one after the fact. And it does pull the data from your earlier heart rate — when I manually added my morning workout, it added 342 calories to my daily burn. But for $400, my wearable should be able to take this burden off my plate (who remembers the exact time they started and finished a workout outside a class?). Additionally, I find the options for activities to be very limited; there’s an option for “weight machines,” but none for strength training, let alone options like powerlifting or CrossFit.

Health insights are minimal to none.

In my opinion, the whole point of wearing a smart ring is to gain insight into how you can improve your health — whether that’s minimizing stress spikes before bedtime, resting when you might be getting sick, and understanding how good your quality of sleep really is. Compared to other smart rings and most modern smartwatches, the Galaxy Ring’s health insights feel pared back — almost like a highlight reel rather than a deep dive.

I got an energy score each morning, a simple read on steps, active time, calories burned, and basic sleep stages from the previous day. But that’s about it. There are a lot of metrics either missing, or that are quite hard to find — there’s no detailed “readiness” metric pulling from my biometrics, my heart rate variability trends (which tell you how strained or rested your body may be) are deep within my energy score, and the continuous skin temperature analysis isn’t able to tell me rather simple things like early illness detection.

By contrast, devices like the Oura Ring 4 or a Garmin smartwatch offer layered contextual data — they combine HRV, resting heart rate, skin temperature, sleep efficacy, and past activity to give you actionable recovery advice, alert you to potential illness, or adapt your daily goals in real time.

The Galaxy Ring sticks to static summaries without meaningful next steps. It felt more like it was passively recording my baseline rather than actively helping me improve it.

You have to toggle between two apps, which can be confusing.

The Galaxy Ring works through both the Wear app (for pairing and quick settings) and Samsung Health (for your actual health data). However, the UI doesn’t make it obvious which app you need at any given time. More than once, I found myself toggling back and forth to figure out how to check my sleep score.

There’s no AI assistant or dynamic insights.

While Oura recently launched its AI Advisor (letting you ask things like, “How can I boost my readiness while traveling?”), Samsung’s insights are static. The ring told me my energy was low and to rest — but what does that mean? Should I cancel my afternoon plans entirely or just do some restorative yoga? There’s no ability to ask follow-ups or get more nuanced help. That said, rumors indicate that an AI-powered feature called “Samsung Health Coach” could be in the works as an update to the app in the near future.

It works best if you already have a Galaxy Watch.

For Samsung users, the Galaxy Ring pairs smoothly with the Samsung ecosystem, and it’s a great complementary wearable for the Galaxy Watch. Many people use the Galaxy Watch to track their daytime fitness and the Galaxy Ring to track their sleep, which is a smart setup for tech enthusiasts. The ring is more comfortable to wear overnight and allows your watch to charge without missing any health data. Having the ring track your heart rate during the day also saves your watch’s battery life. They both feed into the same apps to deliver a more comprehensive picture of your day’s activity and health.

That said, in my opinion, you really need the Galaxy Watch to make the Ring truly functional. The Galaxy Ring alone doesn’t provide a comprehensive enough view of your daily movement. And while this set-up is an easy ask for some, dropping $600 on both wearables combined is a pricey ask for many.

Galaxy Ring vs. Oura Ring 4

As two of the leading smart rings on the market, both the Galaxy Ring and Oura Ring 4 look sleek, track sleep and steps, and provide a daily recovery-style score. But where Samsung shines in design, Oura wins in depth. Oura’s app is more intuitive to navigate, its metrics feel more actionable and helpful, and its auto-detection is better at identifying all activity throughout the day (even cleaning your house) as well as nuanced health flags, like early signs of an illness. You can read my full Oura Ring 4 review.

It’s worth mentioning that this is somewhat of an unfair comparison: Samsung only launched its smart ring in 2024, whereas the first-generation Oura Ring was launched in 2015. That means Oura has had 10 years of refining its technology to Samsung’s one year, and the usability and advanced metrics reflect this.

Samsung’s lack of a subscription is great — but considering the rings are priced relatively the same, I’d gladly pay $5 a month for Oura’s extra insights. It is pretty cool that Galaxy phone users can use gesture controls (like snapping selfies with a finger pinch) with the Ring, but these extras don’t move the needle much on value if health tracking is your main priority.

Your two other options for smart rings are Ultrahuman and Amazfit. In testing, I found the Amazfit doesn’t remotely compare. The Ultrahuman Air Ring has a lot of unique and smart insights for people looking to optimize things like brain health and longevity, but I also found the science is a bit too in-the-weeds for most people. (Read my full Ultrahuman Ring Air review.)

The Oura 4 or the Samsung Galaxy Ring are going to be the best smart rings for most people.

The bottom line

The Galaxy Ring is a sleek and accurate wearable device that provides basic health and fitness data, including steps and sleep quality. It makes learning the basics very approachable with clear, at-a-glance statistics and features, such as categorizing you into a sleeping animal for a cute twist on understanding room for improvement.

However, after two months of testing, I found the Galaxy Ring to be somewhat limited in the insights it provides to help improve my health or fitness. If you’re looking for an incognito wearable (it’s very thin, lightweight, and under-the-radar) to track basic metrics, or if you already own a Galaxy Watch and want a complementary wearable for improved sleep tracking, the Galaxy Ring is worth considering.

But for a price on par with other more advanced wearables, like the Oura Ring 4, Garmin Vivoactive 6, and Apple Watch Series 10, I think the Galaxy Ring has a few more years and iterations before it becomes a truly formidable competitor in the smart ring space.