Tips to keep in mind before buying a smart ring

A smart ring, a relatively new piece of wearable accessory, offers an interesting middle-ground between the power of a smartwatch and the utility of a simpler, hassle-free sensor package. It provides the same health and tracking benefits of a smartwatch without the bulk and without adding to your daily-screen time by forcing you to keep an eye on yet another screen.

What is a smart ring?

For those not familiar with smart rings, these are ring shaped devices that are packed with sensors, a battery, and a wireless radio. These devices are generally used for health and fitness tracking as they can track your heart rate, as well as activities such as walking and exercises, and can also include NFC chips to enable features like contactless payments and contactless access control in secure areas. Here’s what else you need to know about them.

Smart rings can can track your health

Just like smartwatches, smart rings include several sensors capable of monitoring various aspects of your health. These include but are not limited to heart rate, sleep tracking, monitoring blood oxygen levels (in some regions), exercise monitoring, calorie counting, cycle tracking, and more.

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Where a smartwatch would normally communicate this information to you directly, smart rings differ in that regard, by requiring a connected phone to activate and monitor these features. These rings might also require access to cloud servers to process the data before it’s sent to you.

Smart rings have great battery life

Given that smart rings are basically just a sensor package with a battery, the battery life you get from these devices is usually very good. While a smartwatch like the Apple Watch will last about a day of regular use, a ring can last several days on one charge. The displays of traditional smartwatches consume a lot of power.

You don’t get real-time updates

If you want real-time updates on your activities or workouts, say, that won’t be possible from a smart ring. This is great for those who stick to a routine and don’t need continuous feedback, but for someone just starting out on their fitness journey, say, a smartwatch might prove to be more useful.

Some smart ring features might require subscriptions

Smart rings aren’t necessarily cheaper than smartwatches, and to top it off, you might need to subscribe to a related service to access insights into your health and fitness activities. This isn’t true of all smart rings of course, but some of the popular companies like Oura require a subscription for deeper analytics.

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This is either good or bad depending on your relationship with technology. Many more powerful smartwatch features do require subscriptions as well, so if you’re comfortable with that a subscription for a smart ring service might not bother you.

Smart rings can send you notifications

If you like the notification features of smartwatches, note that some smart ring models can also notify you of notifications on your smartphone via a small vibration or an LED indicator. This is a convenient feature to have, especially since the notification system can usually be tuned to only give you, say, critical notifications from certain people or apps. Smartwatches are still more useful in this regard as they have a display that can present more information as well as the option to respond to the notification.

If you’re in the market for a smart ring, be sure to head to croma.com to check out our selection. We have something for everyone, and at a variety of budgets!