What you need to know
- Casio announced the CRW-001-1JR, a “smart ring” that’s actually a tiny smartwatch for your finger.
- It has a stainless steel design, LCD panel, three buttons, and a functional stopwatch and alarm tech.
- It costs about $128 USD, only ships in Japan in three ring sizes, and has no health functionality.
To celebrate its 50th anniversary of making big, rugged watches for athletes, Casio is selling an absurd, adorable little smartwatch that fits on your finger but barely qualifies as a “smart ring” or a fitness device.
The Casio CRW-001-1JR, launching in December 2024 in Japan for ￥19,800 (about $128 USD), isn’t like traditional smart rings since it has no health tracking functionality. Instead, the design “combines practicality and playfulness” (via Google Translate) into a 1/10-sized watch with a stainless steel frame, LCD, and three buttons (via Techradar).
It measures 6.2mm thick and weighs 16g, well above the usual 3mm thickness and 2–5g weight of the best smart rings. Aside from being a conversation starter, the Casio smart ring has programmable alarms to wake you up and a stopwatch function for up to 60 minutes.
Aside from Casio superfans, this quirky novelty tech may not appeal to many people. But the idea of a smart ring that takes after smartwatches is a persistent one, and it’s unclear how close smart rings will eventually stray into smartwatch territory with more traditional smarts beyond health.
Do smart rings need to get “smarter” like watches?
Most smart rings are meant to be invisible; unless you look at the companion app on your phone, you wouldn’t even know if it’s working. But a few rings specifically take after smartwatches — if not to the extent of the Casio smart ring.
The Samsung Galaxy Ring supports gesture control shortcuts for phone connectivity, just as smartwatches have gesture tricks like the double-tap.
The Circular Ring has a haptic motor for gently waking you up, signaling notifications or medication reminders, and guiding you during meditation. The original Pro had a button to end haptic feedback, while the newer Circular Slim has a reactive touch surface on the logo.
Early smart ring prototypes like the Smarty Ring and Motiv Ring had outer displays or LED indicators, following in line with smartwatches at the time. Motiv, for instance, would let you twist the ring to trigger a gesture and then light up the LED if it was successful. A green light signaled a 100% charge, a blue light meant data syncing, and so on.
If you look into the Wild West of smart ring Indiegogo campaigns today, several of them have some kind of touch strip or multi-color LED indicator. Though there’s no guarantee any of them will successfully launch, and they have other ambitious promises like blood pressure tracking, people still spend millions on these prototypes, hoping for the best.
Right now, successful and established smart rings like the Oura Ring 4 have designs centered on their lightness and traditional style. Almost no one wants an LED strip or bulky design that calls attention to the ring’s techy nature; they want subtlety.
But I wonder — as smart rings continue to flood the market offering the same health data — if we’ll see more phone-ring integration to make rings more of a watch replacement for people who wear basic luxury watches instead of Android smartwatches or Apple Watches.
Basically, I’m curious if future smart rings will take the same approach as hybrid watches, with a tiny strip that looks “normal” but can occasionally light up with a tiny notification, letting you know whether or not to take your phone out of your pocket.
But until smart rings can pull that off more subtly than Casio’s unintentionally hilarious design, smart rings and smartwatches should probably stay in their own lanes.
No gimmicks required
The Oura Ring 4 doesn’t have an eye-catching design like the Casio Smart Ring, and that’s for the best. Instead, it has a lightweight and slim design, with all the smarts like heart rate, SpO2, stress, sleep, and daily readiness clustered along the inside of the smart ring. This attractive titanium ring ships in most ring sizes and a variety of finishes, from Brushed Silver and Gold to Stealth and Rose Gold.