My least favorite smart ring has a shot at redeeming itself

I was not at all impressed with the Circular Ring Slim. It wasn’t accurate, it felt like it was made of 3D-printed plastic, syncing took forever, battery life wasn’t great, and honestly, we’d be here all day if I listed everything that went wrong during testing. But for CES 2025, the company behind the ring says it’s here to redeem itself with the $380 Circular Ring 2.

“We had some issues, obviously, with the previous ring,” says Amaury Kosman, cofounder and CEO of Circular. “Mostly electronic, but more than that, we wanted to rebrand the company around two main points. One being accuracy, and the other being a more luxurious, quality-built product.”

That’s immediately apparent looking at the Circular Ring 2’s design and specs. For starters, it’s no longer plastic. The Ring 2 is now made from titanium in four finishes: gold, silver, rose gold, and black. It also sports an upgraded EKG sensor that allows for FDA-cleared atrial fibrillation detection — a first for this category. Beyond that, the new ring has additional photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors for more precise readings. Kosman says the upgraded sensor array translates to much more accurate health tracking compared to the Slim. (It’s a good thing, too; the Slim was sometimes off by 5,000 steps in my testing.)

“We also took into consideration everything we’ve learned from what was told to us [by customers]. The biggest things were connectivity issues, battery life, and at the beginning, the ring wasn’t entirely waterproof. The Slim tried to correct some of that, but obviously we weren’t doing it perfectly,” Kosman says, noting that these issues have also been improved in the new ring.

As mentioned, syncing was an absolute chore with the Slim — so much so, I often just gave up on engaging with the device. Now, Kosman says, the Circular Ring 2 should have no problems with background syncing. He also assures me that battery life has doubled. In performance mode (where all the tracking features are turned on), users ought to get around four days. In a battery-saving mode, the ring gets up to eight days. Also, instead of a tiny, easily lost USB charger, Circular has switched to a charging dock.

Circular’s AI chatbot Kira has also been revamped. Previously, it took 14 days to calibrate, took forever to generate dubious advice, and overall was cumbersome to use. With the Ring 2, Kosman says that it’ll only take about four days to calibrate and the overall experience will be smoother. Recommendations should also be more accurate and complex thanks to improvements to the algorithm and sensors.

Another neat update is that Circular will add digital sizing. Kosman says the company’s website will let customers use their smartphone camera to compare the size of their hand to a card-sized object. From there, Kosman says the company will be able to calculate which size ring a person needs for each finger. Smart ring sizing is a huge pain point for the category, and most companies require customers to order a physical sizing kit before they can actually buy the product.

On paper, it seems like Circular has taken the laundry list of issues with the Slim and ticked them off one by one. To do that, though, some sacrifices had to be made. One of the Slim’s unique features was a built-in haptic motor that worked as a silent alarm. In the future, Circular had promised that the motor could also alert you to notifications. Unfortunately, Kosman says the haptic motor had to go to accommodate better health sensors.

That said, Kosman isn’t giving up on the idea of haptics in smart rings entirely. The goal is to have two product lines — the Circular Ring 2, a more health-focused ring in line with what’s currently available on the market, and an upcoming revamp to the existing haptics-capable Circular Ring Slim.

The Circular Ring 2 will be priced at $380 and is expected to launch in February or March of 2025. We’ll have to see (and test) for ourselves whether Circular can deliver on all these improvements. It’s certainly a tall order considering that there’s increasing competition in the smart ring space. But if it can, that’d be one hell of a redemption arc.