A Smart Ring With a Display Sounds Like More Trouble Than It’s Worth

I still wear the Samsung Galaxy Ring daily and other brands, as they’ve been trickling in throughout the year. I can’t recall a moment when I wished my ring could tell me the time. I’m used to wearing a smartwatch, raising my arm, and flicking my wrist to peek at the hours and minutes. I’d never expected my smart ring to fulfill this role.

There’s a smart ring from a company called Rogbid, which is not a brand I’ve ever heard of but which produces what seems to be ultra-affordable alternatives to the current crop of smartwatches, that alleges to offer the world’s first version with a display. The SR08 Ultra starts at $190 (currently on sale for $90) and features a tiny OLED touch panel that you can tap to interact with. If you go by the renders, the display seems to take up most of the top of the finger.

The display lets you swipe to change data, including time, step count, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and sleep duration. Like smartwatches, sport-tracking modes are available for running, hiking, and cycling. Rogbid says its health suite can help with training because its app charts your movement.

The SR08 Ultra is “deeply” waterproof, and Rogbid advertises 5ATM waterproofness. I’d be curious to know what it measures when you’re swimming. The Galaxy Ring can also track laps but does a middling job of offering any analytical data about the session. I can’t imagine a cheaper smart ring would offer more sophisticated readouts.

The specifications listed for the smart ring seem pretty standard, though I hardly recognize any of the names of the components. It runs on a DIALog DA 14585 chip, not a brand I’ve heard of, and its battery should last 3-5 days, less than big-name brands like Samsung and Oura Ring, which can manage up to six days on a charge. That number is likely dialed down for this Rogbid smart ring because there’s a display to light up. It doesn’t seem worth the trade-off for a tiny display that says the time.

The smart ring’s purpose is to be unobtrusive. It’s been a boon in terms of how much data I can aggregate at any time. Wearing a smartwatch is tedious partly because its display distracts you from everything else. The smart ring lets me be more intentional about my check-ins. I only open the Samsung Health app when ready to confront the data.

This smart ring with a display isn’t a major product from the usual suspects, so I wouldn’t expect it to become common in the zeitgeist yet. If anything, it is more proof that whatever awaits us at CES 2025 is bound to raise an eyebrow.