Circular is trying to stand out from its smart ring competition by making its next wearables more than just health trackers. The Circular Ring 3 Pro and Circular Ring 3 Slim feature sensors for health and fitness tracking but also manage to squeeze in NFC chips for contactless payments and haptic motors that can wake you up or guide you through breathing exercises.
Design-wise, both rings are slimmer than the Circular Ring 2, but the company now offers the Ring 3 Slim as an even thinner alternative. Either Series 3 ring can track your activity, heart rate, blood pressure, sleep (including sleep stages), stress, and menstrual cycle through a combination of PPG sensors (the green and red lights on smartwatches and rings), skin temperature sensors, and accelerometers. Besides thickness, the key advantage the Ring 3 Pro offers over its slimmer sibling is support for ECG readings and AFib detection. The larger ring also gets 12 days of battery life compared to the Slim’s 10 days.
What’s more interesting is what the rings can do outside of health and fitness. Circular says both rings support “Circular Pay,” its take on an Apple Pay or Google Pay-style contactless payment system. Anyone who buys a Ring 3 model will be able to add a Visa or Mastercard to their ring and use it to complete payments. The company has also brought the haptic motor of the original Circular Ring back to the Ring 3 series. Haptic vibrations in the ring can be used as a silent alarm, to notify of a health alert, or as a non-visual guide through a breathing exercise.
For the most part, smart rings like the Galaxy Ring or Oura Ring 5 compete closely on software features because they tend to use similar sensors to track the same aspects of your health. Circular is playing that game, too, and even has an AI assistant called “Kira,” but the addition of NFC makes the Ring 3 series legitimately more useful than its competition. That might matter less if the ring’s other features are found lacking, but paying with a smart ring definitely sounds better than pulling out a smartwatch or your phone.
The Circular Ring 3 Pro and Circular Ring 3 Slim will be available in U.S. sizes 6-14 in gold, silver, rose gold, and black finishes. Circular hasn’t announced the price of the ring, but you can join a waitlist to purchase one now, and the company plans to open pre-orders in December.
