Can you replace your smartwatch with a smart ring?

Key Takeaways

Smart rings offer advanced health tracking with a diminutive size and long battery life, perfect for everyday exercise monitoring.
Smartwatches remain more feature-rich than smart rings, thanks to their screens and more advanced sensors, allowing for more detailed tracking.
Smart rings offer benefits such as lightweight design, sleek aesthetics, ease of use, and extended battery life compared to smartwatches.

Technology, with its rapid advancement, aims not only to become more powerful and feature-rich, but also as small as possible. We’ve gone from computers taking up whole rooms to the thinnest iPad Pro ever in a span of just a few decades, and it seems things won’t slow down anytime soon.

This miniaturization is even more important for everyday wearable tech. While the Apple Watch Ultra is undoubtedly an incredible device, it’s also quite bulky and weighty, making wearing it quite a workout in itself.

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That’s why the concept of a smart ring is so appealing to many people. You can minimize the bulk on your hands by just having a small, decorative ring on your finger instead of a bulky smartwatch, and keep all the health and fitness tracking features that you know and love.

However, is the experience polished and feature-rich enough for you to leave your smartwatch at home and start daily driving a smart ring? The answer may not be as clear-cut as you might think, and here’s everything you need to know about that decision.

What can smart rings do?

When smart rings first arrived on the market, their functionality was extremely limited. They weren’t able to compete with smartwatches and fitness bands. In the last few years, things have progressed rapidly.

Nowadays, smart rings can not only track your steps and heart rate throughout the day, they can also do more advanced tracking, such as blood oxygen saturation levels or automatic exercise detection.

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Smart rings also often excel at sleep tracking. Even if you’re an avid smartwatch user, buying a smart ring allows you to rest your wrist while still tracking your sleep quality.

Couple that with battery life that rivals fitness trackers and vastly exceeds most advanced smartwatches, and you have a recipe for an excellent health monitoring device.

Smartwatches are still a more feature-rich option

That said, smart rings are still a more limited option when compared to smartwatches. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but along with a bigger size comes a list of things that smartwatches are much better at doing.

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While smart rings have some benefits, they are not without their problems.

Let’s start with something obvious, and something you’ll instantly notice if you try using only a smart ring: the lack of a screen. This translates to a slew of limitations, both in terms of features, as well as in the way you use the device.

The biggest difference is the screen

As I mentioned, the biggest difference between these two types of products is the screen or lack there of. While smartwatches are big enough to fit a display on them, smart rings lack any screen at all.

This has huge consequences in the way you use a smart ring, and in what it can do. You’ll notice the difference in the two main areas.

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Firstly, smartwatches are great for notifications — you only need to glance at your wrist to know why your phone’s buzzing and decide if you want to fish it out now. Smart rings, on the other hand, offer no such possibility. Some only give you a little buzz when someone’s calling, but you won’t be able to see and reply to texts, read notifications, and do all the stuff you could do with a smartwatch.

Firstly, smartwatches are great for notifications — you only need to glance at your wrist to know why your phone’s buzzing and decide if you want to fish it out now.

Secondly, smartwatches are great at motivating you to move, exactly because of their accessible screen. At just a glance, you can see how many steps you’ve taken and how your body is doing, making it much easier to keep track of your activity and get motivated to keep moving. With a smart ring, you need to take your phone out of your pocket every time you want to check something, making it not only less convenient, but also potentially less motivating.

You can do more on a smartwatch

The other aspect where smartwatches have an edge over smart rings is the amount of features they offer. Some of these are multimedia features, such as the ability to control your music from your wrist, use GPS, or even take calls and respond to texts. Add to that all the interactive apps on smartwatches, the ability to pay with your card and check out notifications, and the gap widens considerably between smartwatches and smart rings.

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That’s not all. Even the features that don’t require a screen are generally more comprehensive on a smartwatch. The main reason for this is the ability to fit bigger, more accurate and more advanced sensors inside. That means, aside from more detailed and accurate pulse and SpO2 tracking, you can also count on ECG sensors, body temperature sensors, and many others.

That’s not all. Even the features that don’t require a screen are generally more comprehensive on a smartwatch.

What’s more, activity tracking also provides more information on a smartwatch than when using a smart ring. The best fitness watches allow you to go deep into the details of your workout and measure stats such as stride length or maximum sustainable pace, along with other in-depth information. Smart rings are not able to offer such complexity just yet, and stop at more rudimentary statistics.

The Ultrahuman Ring Air on its side on a white desk with rainbow light.

Smart rings have their benefits

Even though smartwatches are generally more powerful and offer more features, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t think about swapping yours for a smart ring. They come with a range of benefits of their own that center on portability and convenience, making for an appealing package.

No cumbersome weight on your wrist

Even though smartwatches offer some extremely useful features, you often pay for that with bulk. The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is an excellent example of that, with a lot of aces up its sleeve, but also a huge footprint.

This may be a problem in various ways, as a large watch can be quite a sticking point with a lot of outfits, making it hard to wear with anything but the most casual clothes. Moreover, some people just don’t like the weight of a watch on their wrist, so even the lightest one might be an annoyance, not to mention something as big as Apple’s latest and greatest.

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Smart rings are an antithesis of that approach. They cram as much tech into a minimalistic footprint as possible, giving you the most important features of a smartwatch but packing it into a small, stylish ring. They are usually quite minimal and understated, so they compliment every outfit really well, whether you’re going to the gym or attending a friend’s wedding. Plus, there is no annoying weight anywhere on your body, as the ring itself weighs almost nothing, and you can get used to it quickly even if you don’t wear jewellery on a regular basis.

Keeping it simple

It may be a bit counter-intuitive, but smart rings can also be quite useful because of their comparative lack of features to smartwatches. Their focus on what’s most important means you don’t have to sift through apps and tons of advanced data that might be very insightful for professional athletes, but is rather cumbersome for your casual daily activities.

It may be a bit counter-intuitive, but smart rings can also be quite useful because of their comparative lack of features to smartwatches.

Smart rings, instead, focus on what’s most important. There is, of course, health and activity tracking, and most smart rings put a big focus on sleep tracking and analysis. It’s especially handy, because many people tend to sleep without their watch, so you can put on a smart ring and still get to know your sleeping pattern better, without the need to encumber your wrist.

There is one more added advantage of this limited set of features – battery life. While most smartwatches tend to last a day or two on a charge, you can easily use most smart rings for about a week away from a charger, making them an ideal accessory for people who are travelling a lot due to their weight and the fact that you don’t need to always have a charger with you.