Forget Galaxy AI – the Galaxy Ring might tempt me back to Samsung

OPINION: During last night’s Samsung Unpacked event, much of the attention was afforded to all the new Galaxy AI features being introduced in the Galaxy S24 range, but for my money, there’s a lot more to get excited about with Samsung’s final announcement of the night: the Galaxy Ring.

Prior to my time at Trusted Reviews, my daily driver was the good old Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. It was my first proper smartphone and so I gladly stuck with it for quite some time as it offered all of the key features I needed back then. When I joined the team however, it became necessary to hop between different handsets for reviews and features, and in the here and now I use the iPhone 15 (occasionally swapping over to my trusty Pixel 7)

It’s been quite some time since I used a Galaxy device as my main handset, but that hasn’t stopped the Galaxy Watch range from continuing to impress me with each new update. Samsung’s put a lot of effort into expanding its knowledge of fitness tracking and as a result, the latest Galaxy Watch 6 is a great wearable for staying on top of your fitness goals (and it’s just a solid smartwatch in its own right).

Circling back to Galaxy AI, a lot of what Samsung depicted during its live event, while impressive, isn’t entirely new. The translation and transcription features have largely been available to Google Pixel users for quite some time, and given Qualcomm’s push to allow for on-device generative AI, you can be sure that similar features will pop up on competing devices sporting the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset in the near future. The Galaxy Ring however is the first time that one of the major mobile manufacturers has embraced this relatively new area of health and fitness tracking, and that’s a big deal.

With an Apple Watch rebrand on the horizon and Google’s continued endeavour to incorporate Fitbit into its ecosystem, it’s very unlikely that we’ll see a digital ring make an appearance from either of those companies in the near future, and so just like how it did with the foldable market, Samsung has an opportunity here to claim a major head start.

Plus, if Samsung’s continued investment in health tracking is anything to go by, the Galaxy Ring might be better suited than the Galaxy Watch to track metrics like your sleep and resting heart rate, as it’s far less likely to move around compared to a watch on your wrist. This also begs the question of how the Ring will even work in conjunction with the Galaxy Watch – will both devices allow Samsung to offer a far more comprehensive look at your health compared to any other smartphone company, or is the former intended as an alternative to the latter for those who would rather wear something a little more discreet?

There’s still so much that we don’t know about the Galaxy Ring but on the surface, it seems as though Samsung is building one heck of an ecosystem between its phones, laptops, wearables and more to the point where it becomes a true one-stop shop that can go head to head with Apple, and that’s got my attention.