Samsung Galaxy Ring leaks reveal more about its health tracking features

We’re expecting Samsung to fully unveil the Galaxy Ring at its Unpacked event on July 10, but many of the smart ring’s health-tracking features have already leaked online.

Tech website Android Authority discovered code in the latest version of the Samsung Health app that relates to features of the Galaxy Ring including stress tracking, heart rate monitoring, menstrual cycle tracking and skin temperature measurements.

The Galaxy Ring, which Samsung first announced at the tech giant’s annual Unpacked event in January, will be the first smart ring Samsung has ever made. The company has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against the market-leading Oura Ring, seeking a declaratory judgment that could prevent Oura from asserting a patent claim against Samsung if it releases the Galaxy Ring – something Oura has previously done against competitors like Circular and Ultrahuman.

Samsung’s filing included a mention of the Galaxy Ring’s release date. The unassuming smart ring — which promises to monitor your health data and offer insights based on your stats throughout the day and night — will join a steadily growing market for wearable devices when it launches in August, according to the filing.

The independent was one of the first outlets to get a look at a prototype of the Galaxy Ring in early February, with our tech critic David Phelan going hands-on with the smart ring. While we don’t have a firm release date for the Galaxy Ring yet, the court has given us a release month , and new leaks suggest it could cost just as much as the Oura Ring, with a subscription included. Keep reading for all the latest news and rumors, from price, specs and features, to design and release date.

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Samsung Galaxy Ring release date: when will the smart ring launch?

Thanks to Samsung’s pre-emptive lawsuit against Oura, we now know that the Samsung Galaxy Ring is expected to launch in August of this year. The lawsuit also confirmed that the Galaxy Ring was fully finalized in mid-May and that it went into mass production in mid-June.

In May, the upcoming wearable appeared as an option in the One UI battery widget on phones, suggesting that Samsung was laying the groundwork for the Galaxy Ring to launch soon.

Until the lawsuit, all we knew was that the Galaxy Ring’s release date would be in the second half of the year. Samsung’s head of B2B wearables, Daniel Seung, revealed in a (now deleted) LinkedIn post that a new health and wellness wearable would be released in the second half of 2024.

The Galaxy Ring will almost certainly be revealed in full during the company’s Galaxy Unpacked event next week. Samsung holds two Galaxy Unpacked events each year: one in January, where it focuses on its S-line smartphones, and another in July, where it focuses on its foldable phones, smartwatches and tablets. The Galaxy Ring fits nicely into this summer’s Unpacked event.

Samsung Galaxy Ring Price: How Much Could the Smart Ring Cost?

When the Galaxy Ring was revealed in January, little was said about its price tag, but we expected it to be an expensive bit of kit considering you’re cramming a ton of sensors into a tiny band. And according to the latest rumor, that may well be the case.

Tech tipper Yogesh Brar has claimed on X (formerly Twitter) that the Samsung Galaxy Ring will cost Rs 35,000 in India and between $300-$350 (£235-£275) in the US. That’s around the same price as the Oura Ring.

He also told Android Authority that he believed the Samsung Galaxy Ring could come to the US with a monthly subscription for less than $10, according to his sources. That lines up with a rumor from CNBC below.

That’s in line with our own speculation. The Oura ring, which is now the gold standard model, starts at £200 and could cost as much as £540, while the Ultrahuman ring costs £349 and the more budget-friendly Circular ring is £199. It would make sense for the Galaxy ring to cost around the same price.

According to CNBCSamsung is considering a subscription service for its Galaxy Health app. While this doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have to pay a subscription fee for the Galaxy Ring, it’s a real possibility. Oura charges a subscription fee for its smart ring. On top of the cost of the ring itself, you’ll also have to pay a monthly fee of £5.99 to get access to all the most useful premium features.

Samsung Galaxy Ring Features and Specifications

An analysis of the Samsung Health app by Android Authority appears to reveal many of the Galaxy Ring’s health-tracking features. They include heart rate, sleep, snoring and menstrual tracking, as well as skin temperature sensors. These are all features we expected to see in Samsung’s first wearable ring.

We first received reports that Samsung was working on a smart ring in 2022, when an article from a Korean publication Naver suggested that the tech giant had teamed up with multiple companies to develop the wearable device.

In the report, Naver said the ring would include an ECG and PPG sensor – both of which are included in the Oura ring – and that the ring would be able to monitor the wearer’s temperature and heart rate. In an interview with CNBCHon Pak, Samsung’s head of digital health, said the ring will be able to track your heart rate, breathing rate, movements you make while you sleep, and the time it takes a person to fall asleep once they’re in bed. These are all features currently available on the Oura ring.

As with most smart rings, the focus is more on sleep than fitness. Pak said Wired that the Galaxy Ring won’t be able to automatically detect workouts at launch, like the Oura Ring can (although we still found this a bit haphazard). It will, however, be able to track and predict fertility.

A real game-changing feature will be payments. The McLear RingPay is the only smart ring that can make contactless payments on NFC terminals, but there are fees and limits, and it can only payments — not sleep tracking or anything else. “We have a whole … team looking at that. But I think it’s clear that we need to look at multiple different use cases for the Ring beyond just health,” Pak said CNBC when asked about contactless payment.

The Galaxy Ring received FCC certification in late May, and the FCC filing gave us some details about the ring’s battery life. According to the filing, the ring’s battery life will vary depending on the ring size you choose. The smallest Galaxy Ring has a 17mAh battery, while the largest ring size has a 22.5mAh battery, though in practice this shouldn’t make much of a difference. However, it’s reportedly rated to last up to nine days on a single charge.

Pak revealed two key features of the Galaxy Ring in a Samsung blog post published in late February. The first is a feature called My Vitality Score, which aggregates your physical well-being, mental well-being and sleep into one number, telling you how ready your body is for the day ahead. It’s essentially the same as the readiness score on the Oura Ring, the Fitbit or the body battery feature on Garmin smartwatches.

The lawsuit filed against Oura in May included a screenshot of the Samsung Health app showing a so-called energy score. This score is calculated based on a number of different metrics, from sleep and heart rate to activity and heart rate variability.

The second main feature is something called booster cards, which provide health insights to help you stay energized throughout the day. This is something that is normally behind a paywall on other smart wearables.

Samsung also said CNBC that it is working on a digital AI coach to help users manage their health and fitness. “There is a digital assistant coach in the future, because we think that is absolutely necessary,” Pak told the publication. “Imagine that big language model, acting as my digital assistant, as you look at the context of my medical records, my physiological data, my engagement with a mobile device, the wearables throughout all of that … it starts to provide more insights and personalization opportunities.”

It will reportedly work as a standalone device too, but you may get better data if you pair it with the Galaxy Watch 6.

Pak also hinted in his blog post that the Galaxy Ring may be involved in monitoring sleep apnea symptoms. Samsung Health can track changes in blood oxygen levels, sleep patterns, and your heart rate while you sleep.

Samsung Galaxy ring design

As for the design, The independent techcritic was among the first to get his hands on a prototype of the device in early February. “The prototypes, which I wasn’t allowed to photograph, came in a dozen sizes and four different colors, including shiny gold and matte black. The rings had a concave outer edge that felt oddly appealing,” he said. “It was light and comfortable, which made it much more appealing to wear at night than a smartwatch, for example.”

Since the Galaxy Ring previewed at MWC Barcelona in late February, more details about the ring have emerged. According to Samsung, it will come in three color options — black, gold, and silver — and there will be nine different sizes to choose from (sizes 5 to 13). A sizing kit will be included, like other smart rings on the market.

ZDNet’s Kerry Wan provided more detailed notes on the Galaxy Ring’s design, saying that the outer ring has an inward dip that makes the wearable easier to wear, even if your fingers expand (which they often do throughout the day). It also fits differently than the Oura Ring, with some reporting needing to size up during Samsung’s briefing.

The company hasn’t released any information about what the Galaxy Ring is made of, but it did say Wired that it had durability in mind. Most of the best smart rings are made of titanium or ceramic, making them less susceptible to scratches, although the slightly cheaper Circular ring is made of aluminum and carbon fiber, and is less durable than others we tested.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for more news on the Galaxy Ring in the coming months. If you’re in the market for a smart ring and want to ditch your fitness tracker for a smart ring, we’ve rated the Oura Ring as our favorite, which has recently released new features as the Galaxy Ring gears up for launch.

The third-generation Oura Ring, released in 2021, is the company’s most capable yet, offering blood oxygen monitoring, workout tracking, daytime heart rate monitoring, and menstrual cycle predictions. “If you’re looking for a sleep tracker, an activity tracker, or just want to know as much about your body as possible, the third-generation Oura Ring checks off a lot of boxes in one small package,” our writer wrote in his review. “With rings in a variety of colors, it’s arguably more stylish than a Fitbit or Garmin.”

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