Smart rings could teach smartwatches a thing or two about charging

Wear OS watches are better than they’ve ever been, but charging them is still a pain. While higher-end wearables have thankfully transitioned to chargers that connect to a power source by USB-C rather than USB-A, each smartwatch manufacturer still uses a different proprietary charger — or in some cases, multiple different proprietary chargers. We’d someday like to see a unified smartwatch charging standard, but in the meantime, smartwatches could seriously simplify charging by following the example of a newer type of wearable: smart rings.

Smartwatch and fitness tracker chargers aren’t interchangeable, but the vast majority are very similar: they have a small puck or pill that magnetically sticks to the back of the wearable, permanently attached to a USB cable. This is true of watches from Samsung, Google, Mobvoi, Apple, and plenty more. The design certainly gets the job done, but it’s not terribly convenient.

In my home, USB port real estate is at a premium, and most of my power bricks are tucked behind furniture, so plugging in or unplugging a smartwatch charger usually means crawling under my desk or reaching behind my bed. It’s not the biggest deal, but it’s a pain. I’ve gotten so tired of dealing with it that I bought a second charger for my Pixel Watch just for travel.

Smart ring manufacturers have figured out a better solution. Chargers for rings from Oura, Ultrahuman, and others are tiny little things with no cables attached. To connect to power, the chargers have USB-C input. It’s a very simple idea, but I think it makes a huge difference for convenience: when I want to move the charger for my Oura Ring to a different room, it’s as simple as plugging the little puck into a different USB-C cable. And when I’m traveling, I don’t need to deal with yet another spooled-up cable in my bag, I can just connect the charger to the same cable I use for my phone, my laptop, my Nintendo Switch, and, well, pretty much everything else I own.

The Oura Ring and its charger.

I’d love to see smartwatch makers take a similar tack to smart rings, basically replacing the hardwired cables on their watches’ chargers with USB-C ports. It’d probably make the charging pucks a little larger — the third-gen Oura Ring’s charger is nearly twice as wide as the puck on the end of the Pixel Watch 2’s — but for the added convenience, I think that’s more than a fair trade.

I still hope that, as smartwatches as a product category continue to mature, they eventually adopt a standardized charger — magnetic inductive charging like what Qi2 offers seems like a safe bet. But in the meantime, making wearables’ myriad different chargers less of a pain to deal with would be a great step, and smart rings show it’s possible.