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Sometimes, you\u2019re in bed and the glow from your smart ring\u2019s optical heart rate sensor creeps into your peripheral vision. It got me thinking about how Samsung (and potentially Apple) will join the smart ring market, and why that\u2019s a terrible idea. You see, these companies want devices that make their presence known in your life, embedding themselves in your routine. But smart rings blend into the background on purpose, which limits how much you can, or will want, to do with them.<\/p>\n
Back in February, Samsung announced the Galaxy Ring<\/a>, a health-tracking wearable baked into a ring. When it launches later this year, it will continuously monitor your sleep, breathing, movement and reproductive cycle. Entirely coincidentally, I\u2019m sure, Bloomberg<\/em><\/a> reported Apple was also conducting investigations into its own smart ring platform. Both companies are not-so secretly gunning for the Oura Ring<\/a>, the market leader in finger-worn wearables. And I\u2019ve been testing one of these for a long while.<\/p>\n Oura tracks your sleep, temperature, activity, post-exertion recovery and menstrual cycle. It\u2019s a marvel of engineering to get so much technology into such a small and elegant package. The downside, if you can call it that, is there\u2019s no way to access the data the ring collects, or its insights, unless you have a phone on hand.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the thing: It\u2019s not that often I find myself actually opening the app to see what the stats are saying. If I wake up feeling like crap, there\u2019s normally a self-evident reason why that needs no further explanation. And on those rare occasions when I wake up and don\u2019t know why I\u2019m feeling bad, the last thing that would occur to me is to check my phone. Who wants to look at fine-grain data when your head is pounding and your eyes refuse to focus?<\/p>\n That friction, that small gap between having the information there and it being easily accessible is a problem. Yeah, you can get a notification if your “Readiness Score” \u2014 Oura’s proprietary metric for overall health \u2014 falls below a certain level. But I\u2019ve been using this thing for long enough that I\u2019ve never taken up the habit, and I suspect others would struggle to do so, too. It\u2019s nice to have that information on those rare occasions when I\u2019m thinking enough about it to look at my data over a longer period of time. But I can\u2019t imagine myself looking at this data once or twice a day.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also not that useful for workout tracking, principally because you won\u2019t want to risk your $300 gadget in the gym. The first time I took it to work out, I picked up a pair of metal dumbbells, realized their knurled handles were rubbing against the metal of the ring and quickly took it off.<\/p>\n Because there\u2019s no direct method of input, it\u2019s far too easy to forget it\u2019s there and not make use of its information. If you\u2019re all-in on using a ring to track your fitness because you won\u2019t wear a smartwatch or fitness tracker, and you\u2019re always checking your stats, then it\u2019ll work for you. But, deep down, I prefer a watch with a display that\u2019s easy enough to check as a matter of instinct. And it\u2019s this that I think should be a concern for Samsung and, potentially, Apple, as they look to move into this space. A smart ring caters to a niche inside a niche \u2013 quantified self obsessives who refuse to wear a watch. They obviously believe that\u2019s enough of a draw to devote time and money to building their own, but I\u2019m not sure it\u2019ll be a blockbuster.<\/p>\n Not to mention these rings only have a few hooks to keep users inside their specific corporate bubble. Both Apple and Samsung have dedicated health-tracking apps and it\u2019s likely whoever buys one of these will have one fewer reason to switch providers in future. But compare that to the watches, which offer health tracking, messaging, app interactions and mobile payments. Smartwatches are beneficial to these platforms because they help draw together various features from the phone. Rings do not.<\/p>\n Perhaps this is another sight tech\u2019s biggest players now just need to copy and destroy their smaller rivals rather than striving for new products. Smart rings cater to a small market, albeit one that big tech could dominate with very little time and effort. Especially given the strength of their relative brands, which means these devices will more or less sell themselves to diehard fans. But is that all a new product can be in 2024, and is that what we could or should expect these companies to be doing?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n