Apple Watch Ultra and Oura Ring Jason Hiner/ZDNET
I've been wearing an Apple Watch every day for the past decade and I've been using it to track my sleep every night since 2019. Over the past few years, I've known more and more friends, family, and colleagues opting for smart rings instead of smart watches to track their health. I've also personally tested the Oura Ring, the Samsung Galaxy Ring, and the Ultrahuman Ring Air.
But eventually, I keep taking off the rings and coming back to the Apple Watch as my sole health tracker.
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The funny thing is that I had quit wearing a watch for years before the Apple Watch arrived in 2015, preferring to just use my phone to keep track of the time. But during the past two years, I've been wearing the Apple Watch Ultra -- the largest and most bulky watch in the lineup.
So why do I prefer the Apple Watch to much smaller and more discreet smart rings? It comes down to three reasons.
1. Comfort
Despite wearing the heavy Apple Watch Ultra while I sleep, I've gotten so accustomed to wearing an Apple Watch that I'm not very conscious of it when it's on my wrist -- either during the day or when I sleep.
I can't say the same for smart rings. The Oura Ring 4 and the Ultrahuman Ring Air are particularly bulky for rings and not very comfortable to wear when I'm sleeping. The Samsung Galaxy Ring is a little bit better because it's thinner and lighter. It's amazing how much technology is packed into these tiny rings, but I still find them a lot more noticeable and uncomfortable to wear compared to my wedding ring, for instance.
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I'll admit that it's possible I'd get used to these rings over time the way I have with the Apple Watch, but I've worn smart rings for weeks and months at a time for testing and still found them distracting to wear to sleep and I always felt relieved to stop wearing them when I was done testing the ring.
2. Glanceable info and quick actions
The people I know who love smart rings often say that one of the things they appreciate is that the rings don't have screens and so they are less distracting. However, I actually come at it from the other direction. There are multiple things the Apple Watch does to save me from pulling out my phone throughout every day.
To be clear, I have set up the Apple Watch Ultra to do a lot. I use the Modular Ultra watchface and it has eight different complications you can set -- plus I also use a Shortcut to customize the Action Button. So that gives me a total of nine things the Apple Watch Ultra can show and do: time, date, weather, battery life, activity, workout, mindfulness, hydration, and my custom Shortcut to pair heart tracking with the Supernatural workout app on Meta Quest.
I also regularly catch important notifications on the Apple Watch that I likely would have missed on my phone. To be clear, I don't get all of my notifications on the watch, but I have tuned the watch notification settings so that the most important ones ping my wrist. In other words, the Apple Watch does far more for me than just telling the time and tracking my activity.
Modular Ultra watch face on the Apple Watch Ultra. Jason Hiner/ZDNET
3. Fewer health stressors
Smart rings can arguably offer better sleep and stress tracking than the Apple Watch and other smart watches, since the rings typically offer more details about both sleep and stress. And you can argue that a person could use that data to change some of their habits so that they can get more and better sleep, or launch a guided breathing session to help relieve their stress, for example.
However, in practice there are some realities that are hard to shift, and having an app on your phone repeatedly remind you that you're not getting enough sleep and/or not managing your stress very well can actually be more detrimental than helpful. That's what I found.
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I also discovered that some of the measurements and insights that the smart ring made were shallow, or at least not very nuanced. For instance, I would get more sleep than normal one night and then less the next night and so I would feel pretty normal overall. Meanwhile, the ring app would be lighting up with red notifications that I needed to adjust my sleep schedule. And so I wondered, "Maybe I'm more tired than I thought?" But I wasn't. And when I stopped wearing the ring I felt like my stress level actually went down.
Drawback: Fewer actionable insights
I'll also admit that there's one thing I wish Apple Watch could do more like the best smart rings and that's provide more actionable notifications and coaching tips. For example, in my review of the Samsung Galaxy Ring I noted that it did an excellent job of correlating between two data points and providing a helpful recommendation.
In that case, the Galaxy Ring noted that one of the factors that had lowered my "Energy" score was when my "Previous day activity" showed "moderate-to-vigorous exercise time" that was significantly below my average of 33 to 87 minutes. That was a good reminder that not getting in enough cardio the day before could be a factor in reducing my energy level -- and that tracked with my lived experience. It was also something that was more manageable for me to change.
The Apple Watch can produce a ton of insights in the Apple Health app and it does a nice job of showing changes in "Trends" such as resting heart rate, miles walked or run, steps, exercise minutes, and a lot more. But what it doesn't do is provide a sleep score, energy score, or other kinds of ratings, and it doesn't correlate its trends with potential outcomes.
If the Apple Watch took a page from smart rings on that, it could surely provide a lot more actionable insights that could help us get even more usefulness out of the watch -- especially for those of us who have been wearing it over a period of not just months but years.