Samsung’s Galaxy Ring is an amazing piece of tech but comes with a huge string attached. The wearable packs a lithium-ion battery and is too small and complex to repair, which makes it 100% disposable. The battery has a limited shelf life — about 400 cycles or two years of regular use — and cannot be replaced. Once the battery wears out and stops holding a charge, your Galaxy Ring turns into e-waste. This applies to earbuds too.
Your Galaxy Ring may stop working after two years, and you can’t fix it
Lithium-ion batteries typically wear out completely after about 400 charging cycles — one cycle is when a fully charged battery drains to zero. So, if you charge your device every two days, you get a total lifespan of roughly 800 days. After that, the battery stops holding a charge and needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, replacing the battery is not an option for tiny tech gadgets like the Galaxy Ring and the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro.
As such, these devices have a limited shelf life too. “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,” repair experts and iFixit say. This applies to wireless earbuds and other tiny gadgets featuring a lithium-ion battery. Once the battery goes kaput, it turns into e-waste that you should dispose of responsibly. Or maybe keep it in your house museum, the choice is yours.
The lifespan of your Galaxy Ring depends on how frequently you charge it. The more charge cycles, the faster the battery health depletes and the earlier the device becomes useless. As iFixit points out, many Oura Ring users have found out the hard way. Their rings no longer make it through the night, thus failing to track sleep. “It’s not by accident that the Oura Ring specifically excludes batteries from their one-year warranty,” iFixit adds.
Long story short, your Galaxy Ring may stop working after two years, and you can’t fix it. If you are okay with that, it’s a wonderful device for non-intrusive everyday health monitoring. The ring offers almost the same set of health features as the Galaxy Watch. It should only get better with time. You don’t even need a Samsung phone to get the best out of the Galaxy Ring. All features work flawlessly when paired with Android phones from other brands.
Sumit is passionate about technology and has been professionally writing on tech since 2017. He’s a mathematics graduate by education and enjoys teaching basic mathematics tricks to school kids in his spare time. Sumit believes in artificial intelligence and dreams of a fully open, intelligent and connected world.
