Many similarities and one key difference

• 

  Staff Pick

  Samsung Galaxy Ring

  Samsung’s first smart ring brings various health features, including detailed sleep reports, 24/7 heart rate tracking, and the ability to generate an Energy recovery score. It’s available in nine sizes and three finishes and has a charging case that adds up to 1.5x the battery life.

  Pros

  • No subscription required
  • Design is perfect for swollen fingers
  • Rich and detailed sleep reports

  Cons

  • No Sleep Apnea feature
  • Battery life isn’t as good
  • Only works with Android

• 

  Premium pick

  RingConn Gen 2

  $209 $299 Save $90

  The RingConn Gen 2 is extremely polished, well-designed, and capable. While being competitively priced, it gets so many things right that other smart rings do not. Its svelte design, long battery life, and extensive health tracking make it an easy recommendation. 

  Pros

  • Only smart ring with sleep apnea
  • Three years of RingConn smart ring experience
  • Excellent battery life
  • Better dust and water resistance
  • Supports Android and iOS

  Cons

  • Concerns about the data accuracy
  • Recovery score is only in beta
  • Concerns about data accuracy

If you’re looking for the best smart rings, you will come across two of the newest rings that have just been launched. Samsung’s Galaxy Ring launched last month, and in our ​review, we called it the best smart ring you can buy now. Just days later, RingConn launched the RingConn Gen 2 smart ring and firmly challenged Samsung for that crown.

The Galaxy Ring represents a new category for Samsung, but also a natural extension of the 65 million-strong Samsung Health user base. RingConn is three years into its smart ring journey, and its second-generation product brings a host of upgrades that make it an incredibly compelling smart ring.

Should you buy the RingConn Gen 2, which has all the benefits of three years of smart ring experience, or the Galaxy Ring, which benefits from Samsung’s decade-plus experience in health? Let’s find out.

Price, availability, and specifications

Half the price with more features

The Galaxy Ring has proven far more popular than Samsung expected and is already widely sold out in the US. If you can find one ready to ship, it will cost you $399, although this is a one-off cost and doesn’t require a subscription to use its features.

The RingConn Gen 2 hasn’t officially launched yet, but if you buy it on Kickstarter, it has a super early bird price of just $209. That’s for a smart ring with many of the same design features as the Galaxy Ring, but at half the price. Like the Galaxy Ring, there’s no subscription needed, and it comes with certain features available on Samsung watches, like the Galaxy Watch Ultra, but not the Galaxy Ring.

The RingConn Gen 2 comes in three finishes (Silver, Black, and Gold) and nine sizes (US 6–US 14), while the Galaxy Ring comes in the same three finishes but in slightly smaller sizes (US 5–US 13). The RingConn Gen 2 can only be pre-ordered via Kickstarter, and you’ll be sent a sizing kit; you can size your finger at any Best Buy store or buy the Galaxy Ring sizing kit online and get the $10 fee credited toward your Galaxy Ring order.

• 	Samsung Galaxy Ring	RingConn Gen 2
  Battery life	Up to 7 days	10+ days
  Sensors	Accelerometer; PPG; skin temperature	Accelerometer, skin temperature, PPG, SpO2
  Water Resistance	IP68; 10 ATM	IP68, up to 100m
  Ring sizing	5 – 13	6 – 14
  Color	Titanium Black; Titanium Silver; Titanium Gold	Gold, rose gold, silver, matte black
  Price	$399.99	$299
  Weight	2.3 g – 3 g	2-3g
  Built material	Titanium	Titanium

Design

The same improvements over the Oura ring

The third-generation Oura Ring was the undisputed market leader in smart rings earlier this year, but the Galaxy Ring and RingConn Gen 2 have challenged the Oura Ring with notable improvements. Namely, they’re thinner, lighter, and sleeker, with better battery life and more elegant charging solutions.

The Galaxy Ring is 7mm wide and 2.6mm thick and weighs between two and three grams, depending on the size. The RingConn Gen 2 is slightly narrower and thinner, at 6.8mm wide and 2mm thick, but weighs the same. Both are significantly lighter than the Oura Ring (four to six grams) and more comfortable on your finger.

During my extensive time with the Galaxy Ring, I came to enjoy the concave shape that dips in the middle. It’s a blessing for preventing scratches and much more comfortable for swollen fingers. Part of the latter comes from the flatter sensors, but the RingConn Gen 2 has taller sensors that will likely apply more pressure to swollen fingers.

Both rings have IP68 dust and water resistance in relatively deeper waters. The Galaxy Ring is resistant to up to 50 ATM (500 meters), while the RingConn Gen 2 is rated up to 100 ATM (1000 meters). This means the Galaxy Ring is suitable for scuba diving and high-impact water sports, while the RingConn Gen 2 is also capable of deep-sea diving.

Battery life

Everything you’d expect from a flagship smart ring

When it comes to hardware, both rings are flagships in every sense, offering the latest hardware, excellent designs, and a focus on health tracking. They each also take a different approach to solving a big problem with smart rings: battery life and how to charge.

One of my favorite Galaxy Ring features is the portable charging case. In my testing, it offered up to 1.7x the battery life of the Galaxy Ring — depending on the size — which is very impressive.

The smaller sizes of the Galaxy Ring are rated as offering up to six days of battery life, and they lasted five days and 19 hours in my testing. The bigger sizes are rated as up to seven days, and when paired with the Galaxy Watch Ultra, last over nine days. Once you add it to the charging case, the Galaxy Ring can easily offer over two weeks of battery life.

Similarly, one of the standout features of the RingConn Gen 2 is its battery life. It lasts 10–12 days on a single charge, and when paired with the included charging case, it can last up to 150 days. There’s no denying that it has a superior battery on paper, but the real test will be when we complete our full review.

Regardless of which you buy, you’ll get outstanding battery life and a convenient way to charge on the go.

Sleep, Activity, and other Health Features

The hero Galaxy Watch Ultra feature on a smart ring

Samsung’s latest smartwatch is its first premium watch. The Galaxy Watch Ultra brings many new features, but its Sleep Apnea monitoring is the hero feature, providing a compelling reason to buy the Galaxy Watch Ultra or Galaxy Watch 7 — the first devices to be FDA-approved for sleep apnea monitoring — but it isn’t a feature on the Galaxy Ring.

Instead, the RingConn Gen 2 offers the first Sleep Apnea monitoring on a smart ring. Although the feature is not FDA-approved, and the data should be judged cautiously, it’s a fantastic achievement, considering that Samsung couldn’t bring this to the Galaxy Ring. RingConn uses AI and a transformer-based deep learning model to identify critical sleep risk events and is the only smart ring currently offering Sleep Apnea Monitoring.

Aside from the Sleep Apnea feature, both rings offer a suite of sleep measuring and reporting features that have become standard on most smart devices. These include sleep reports, time and stages, cardiac markers such as heart rate variability and resting heart rate, and activity and energy markers.

Both also offer some form of energy score to indicate your readiness for the day ahead. RingConn has wrapped its Wellness Balance score in a beta tag to ensure it can iron out any kinks, while the Energy Score is new to Samsung Health for the Galaxy Ring, Watch Ultra, and Watch 7. Both use AI and a range of indicators (including sleep quality, heart rate variability, and activity) to quantify how much you should push the following day.

It remains to be seen how accurate the RingConn data is, especially as this was an issue with the RingConn Gen 1, but the Galaxy Ring sleep data has proven to be fairly accurate in my testing.

Which should you buy?

Big name brand or a better feature set?

The RingConn Gen 2 is a shining example of improving a first-generation product by listening to user feedback, and the Galaxy Ring is a shining example of how to build an excellent first-generation product by listening to customer feedback.

After digging into it, I found that the differences between the two smart rings are in the little things. While the Galaxy Ring is limited to Android phones, the RingConn Gen 2 works with iOS and Android, meaning it should work even if you change platforms.

On the other hand, the Galaxy Ring offers something the RingConn Gen 2 doesn’t: it’s made by a major tech company. Samsung has the resources to invest far more than any other smart ring maker to ensure the Galaxy Ring is as successful as possible and gains as many features as possible.

Ultimately, what you should buy depends on your personal preferences. If you use a Galaxy Watch, you can gain many benefits by using it with a Galaxy Ring. These include battery life gains for the Ring, a unified health profile in Samsung Health using data from both devices, and much more. I look forward to trying the RingConn Gen 2, but I’ll probably keep the Galaxy Ring as my smart ring

I have reservations about the accuracy of the RingConn data — mostly based on the performance of the RingConn Gen 1 — and I like the integration between the Galaxy Watch and Galaxy Ring. The RingConn Gen 2 seems like the ideal replacement for my Oura Ring, however, which is currently paired with my iPhone.

Nirave is a creator, evangelist, and founder of House of Tech. A heart attack at 33 inspired him to publish the Impact of Tech newsletter, which covers the best technology and its impact on mental, physical, and emotional health. For more, follow him on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.