New product categories are a big deal for tech companies. Take the Apple Watch Ultra: not only did it get massive amounts of attention when it was announced, it turned out to be a widely popular device that’s replaced the 45mm Series 8 and 9 on every hip technophile’s wrist.
So it’s no surprise that Samsung is enviously eyeing that market share and attempting to duplicate Apple’s success with the Galaxy Watch Ultra. Samsung may have been late to the show with the Watch Ultra, but they have beaten Apple to market with an Oura-style health tracker ring.
The Galaxy Ring—and all smart rings like it—comes with a huge string attached: It’s 100% disposable, just like the AirPod-style Buds3 that Samsung just released. The culprit? The lithium ion batteries.
Lithium ion batteries have a shelf life. It’s hard to quantify exactly how long a battery will last but generally speaking, the chemistry used in consumer grade batteries should give us at least 400 cycles of use. One cycle is a fully charged battery being depleted to zero. Do that 400 times and, more often than not, you’ll have worn the battery out. If you want to know more about how lithium ion batteries work, we’ve got a whole blog post on the subject just for you.
So what happens to all those smart rings when the battery goes kaput? Simple, you throw the entire device away. It’s impossible to fix a smart ring because once it dies, you can’t get to the battery without destroying the device in the process.
The unfortunate truth is that most people still don’t know that lithium ion batteries have an expiry date attached to them. It’s not by accident that the Oura Ring specifically excludes batteries from their one year warranty.
Neptune’s Gaze
We teamed up with the bright engineers over at Lumafield for this one because there really is only one way to see the interior of disposable tech without destroying it and that’s with computed tomography (CT) scans, a type of x-ray technology that takes multiple snaps of an object and stitches it together to create a 3D view.
Unfortunately, Samsung seems to have had a bumpy product launch and of the three rings we placed on order, only one of them showed up. The One Galaxy Ring that did reach us probably should have been held back as well: Our Ring refused to hold a charge! That does raise the question, was this purely a supply and logistics issue or did Samsung find similar hardware issues with other Galaxy Rings? After the Buds3 Pro tip breaking fiasco, we can only wonder.
So we sent out our one and only Galaxy Ring (the One Ring™, if you will) so they could throw it in their Neptune CT scanner. It’s with the greatest joy that we unveil the secrets of the Galaxy Ring:
You can explore the interactive scan by panning and zooming on the embed. Pretty neat, eh? There’s more where that came from. Let’s take a quick tour of the scans Lumafield created before we start the destructive analysis.
Battery, Inductive Charging Coil, and…a Press Connector?!
This scan shows the ring sitting inside the charging case. We’ve blanked out the rest of the case and electronics to reduce the amount of clutter in the image.
On the right hand side of the ring is the faint outline of a lithium polymer battery pouch. There’s an inductive coil sitting right on top of the battery (the lines that look like a rectangular track) and another very similar inductive coil that’s parallel and slightly separated from the first. That second inductive coil is inside the charging case and works together with the inductive coil in the ring to recharge the battery inside the Galaxy Ring. Inductive charging is the only practical way to deliver power to a device that doesn’t have any ports.
But there’s something else here that sticks out like a sore thumb…that is a press connector joining the battery to the rest of the board! This is a surprising use of space, why isn’t this directly soldered? Nobody is getting back in there to disconnect this thing!
We love press connectors, they’re easy to work with and make replacing batteries a sight easier than desoldering a half dozen wires. But this one is sealed into the device and serves no purpose in replacement or repair. Our best guess as to why it’s in the Galaxy Ring: The battery and wireless charging coil were made in one place, the circuit board somewhere else, and it all comes to a production line somewhere where the two need to be connected together quickly and cheaply. Hence the press connector. It’s not for your benefit, it’s for the manufacturers.
Just for fun, let’s take a look at the Oura Ring Gen3 and compare the construction.
Teardown
All right, enough with the sci-fi scans. Let’s physically open up the ring and see what it really looks like.Easier said than done—but that’s what you’ve got us for!
The destructive disassembly of the Galaxy Ring helps us visualize and confirm our observations in the CT scans. Easier said than done. The resin and plastic coating on the inside of the ring has to be melted and chipped away with a dental pick. If you’re patient and careful, you’ll end up with something like this:
As we’d suspected, the battery and inductive coil connect to the circuit board by way of the press connector. The Oura Ring Gen3 had the same setup but each end of the coil was soldered to the board to save space.
Our battery is too far gone to positively ID the capacity but the tech specs from Samsung’s website states that the size 11 ring (the battery capacity actually changes depending on the ring size) should have a 19.5 mAh battery which should translate to roughly 0.072 Wh assuming a 3.7 V nominal voltage.
As for the electronics, nothing is earth shatteringly new. From the green and red LEDs that measure blood oxygen levels by calculating how much light is reflected back to the sensors, to the various micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) IC’s that measure movement, our chip ID shows that everything in here is technology already available in other smart rings.
This becomes all the more evident when you strip the outer ring away and reveal what’s left.
Is This the One Ring to Rule Them All?
Relative to other modern electronics, this is a pretty simple device. There’s nothing wrong with simple but there is something wrong with unrepairable. Just like the Galaxy Buds3, the Galaxy Ring is a disposable tech accessory that isn’t designed to last more than two years. It’s considered a bonus if you do get more out of it but there’s no question that each one of these rings will end up being added to our ever growing e-waste problem.
We can’t recommend buying disposable tech like this. But it sure does look neat!
