Engadget Podcast: Samsung Galaxy Ring review, EFF on KOSA, and another AI “Friend”

Samsung's Galaxy Ring is here, and honestly it's just a bit basic. This week, Cherlynn and Devindra dive into what does and doesn't work with Samsung's latest wearable. Also, we discuss Friend's new AI gadget, which listens to your conversations and sends text messages to help you feel less lonely. To get a better sense of the device, Devindra also talks to Friend's CEO, Avi Schiffmann, about why he's leaning away from the productivity side of AI helpers and more towards the vibes of friendly AI. (And yes, we also ask why he spent $1.8 million of Friend's $2.5 million funding just to buy the Friend.com domain.)

In other news, we discuss the potential impact of KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act) with India McKinney, the EFF’s Director of Federal Affairs. While lawmakers are uniformly positioning KOSA as a way to protect kids on the internet, it could also lead to draconian censorship and destroy free speech on the web as we know it.

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Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

Topics

• Cherlynn reviews the Samsung Galaxy Ring: Great sleep tracking, but needs more features – 2:13

• Interview with Avi Schiffmann, founder of AI wearable company Friend – 27:27

• KOSA passes the senate – we chat with EFF’s India McKinney about why it matters – 48:22

• What we’ve learned since the massive 7/19 Crowdstrike outage – 1:12:07

• Elon Musk shared an AI altered video of Kamala Harris without labeling, breaking the rules of his own site – 1:18:57

• Apple Intelligence arrives in the iOS 18.1 developer beta – 1:21:57

• Google makes peace with third-party cookies after years of mixed signals – 1:26:38

• Around Engadget: Mat Smith’s Galaxy Flip 6 review – 1:29:36

• Working on – 1:31:44

• Pop culture picks – 1:32:22

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Credits 

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low
Guests: Friend CEO Avi Schiffman, EFF Director of Federal Affairs India McKinney
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

Transcript

Devindra: What's up, Internet? And welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Devindra

Cherlynn: Hardwar. I'm Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low.

Devindra: Today we are back from a bit of a break, a bit of a summer break. How are you doing, Cherlynn?

Cherlynn: Jet lagged.

Devindra: Oh, man. Yeah, you were in Singapore, right? You came all the way back over.

How long were you in Singapore?

Cherlynn: It was under a week, but including travel, I was gone for about a week and basically missed two days of recording this podcast. So that's why we missed this many episodes. How dare you

Devindra: to see your family, to have good food at the hawker stands. How dare you? That's also a really fast trip for such a long flight, Cherlynn.

You're such a trooper. But this week, folks, we are coming back into the swing of things. Cherlynnn is going to talk about her review of the Samsung Galaxy Ring. We're going to talk about KOSA passing the Senate. This is something we've talked about before, the Kids Online Safety Act. And we're going to talk a bit about the the AI gadget, Friend.

which debuted this week with a really, I don't know, cheesy trailer and had a lot of us laughing, but we also have some interviews with folks too. We have Avi Schiffmann, the CEO friend who talks with me about what he's trying to accomplish with this device and why he moved away from making it like a productivity focused thing, like the Humane AI pin or the Rabbit R1.

And joining us to talk about KOSA is India McKinney, director of federal affairs at the EFF. They're going to talk about why. This bill has a huge amount of privacy concerns. People are worried about censorship online because of this bill and the things that can, it can stop online as always, folks, if you're enjoying the show, please be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcast of choice, leave us a review on iTunes.

Drop us an email at podcast@engadget.Com. We love your feedback. We love questions and anything you send us can be mentioned on the show. So if you want to be internet famous for an episode or something, just a shout us out. We also typically live stream the show on Thursday mornings around 10 45 AM Eastern on our YouTube channel.

So join us for that. You can talk with the chat crew. You can see us do some Q and a live on camera today. Sheldon's going to show off the the galaxy ring boy. It's round. I don't know what else you can show off with that thing, Cherlynn, but we'll talk a bit about that thing. Let's get right into it, actually.

Cherlynn, you reviewed the Galaxy Ring. This was a device I was not super amped about, but Samsung I feel like Samsung was really leaning on it because Apple hasn't done it yet. There aren't too many other smart rings out there, except for the Oura. How do you feel about this thing?

Cherlynn: Okay, so to your point, on its own, the Ring doesn't do a lot.

And it's, No, it's really basic. Like it's a 400 device. That's got a bunch of sensors on it. It will track your. Heart rate variability, skin temperature, steps, and all that stuff.

Devindra: It's 400? That, that didn't click with me until now. Yeah, it's actually 399. You could get an Apple Watch for that price.

Yeah,

Cherlynn: it is expensive so you have to be okay with the fact that you're paying a lot of money for something that on its own, once again, doesn't do a lot. And the thing is you, with the ring, you leave it there to passively call it, collect data on you. And then you spend most of your time. If you're like me and interested in those, bits of information, you spend most of your time on the Samsung health app on the phone.

And I. I like it. I think it's very comfortable to wear partly because it's so paired down. It doesn't have a lot. It's not as heavy as the aura ring. In fact, it's actually half the weight.

Devindra: The ring is a thick boy. If you look at it, it's chunky, much

Cherlynn: thicker. And in fact, with the Samsung galaxy ring, I felt like so mine is a size seven, which is the third smallest size Samsung offers.

And that's pretty similar to my actual ring size for those who are wondering, but I would find even throughout the day as your body changes, it never gets too tight. In fact, like my, it might actually be too loose at times, which is important because that affects my blood oxygen readings at night.

Which I'll get into later, but first and foremost, the galaxy ring is a passive health. Data tracking device. And that's, if it's right for you and if you have the 400, you want to spend on that, go for it. I think there are people out there that are looking for low key, low profile gadget like this Martha on the chat asked a very good question.

And it's something that is actually crucial in my review, which is. Was or is there any reason to buy or get the smart ring if you have a smart watch? I, for me, I found in my testing that the ideal combination is a ring and a watch. If I had a crap ton of money. I would wear the ring to track passive things like sleeping, low level activities, like neat stuff.

And then the watch, I would use for tracking workouts or when I'm like out and about, and I'm more likely to want to get notifications on a wrist worn screen. That really, like I found that when I was watching, wearing both the watch ultra and the galaxy ring to be like the best combo. And I was out and about Because I don't want to wear that goddamn watch ultra at home.

It's so huge. I hate it.

Devindra: Yeah, that device may not have been meant for you. Just like the Apple watch ultra, right? That is just a big honking thing. I will say

Cherlynn: the watch ultra never felt as big as the Galaxy one because don't forget what Samsung's doing with the Galaxy watch ultra is to stuff a circular screen into a squarish body.

So it just adds bulk. It doesn't need to be as bulky as It is as or it just isn't the Apple Watch Ultra isn't as bulky, but

Devindra: yeah, it's fits the shape of your wrist more by being a little more squarish, that's a good question, though, by the way, from Mark Dell, is that I think the thing facing wearables, I remember when a lot of the wearable stuff, when Fitbit first came out, when Jawbone had their early stuff, people were like, Oh, this is so cool.

I could track my activity. I could do all sorts of stuff. And the constant question was why do I need this in addition to my smartphone? And now the question is, why do you need the smart ring? Likely in addition to an Apple, to a smart watch. And then the, I feel like the I don't know, algebra for that.

Like the equation for that math is too annoying and too difficult for most consumers. It just seems like these things don't fully justify themselves yet.

Cherlynn: I, for one, I think that one thing I said in my review is that this thing doesn't do much, and that's pretty that's okay by me. And I will point out that what it doesn't do is frustrating.

But to that point where if you do have that, you've decided I, I like this setup, right? Wearing a ring and a watch. The Galaxy, the Samsung Health app is actually not bad at parsing and putting together all of your data on the one page. You don't have to keep jumping back and forth between two windows or apps.

To just get all your data, it just all adds up, right? So one of the things that Samsung introduced alongside the galaxy ring and the watch ultra is it's galaxy AI enabled health, features like the energy score, which by the way, Garmin and Fitbit has been doing forever and ever, but the energy

Devindra: score, it's

Cherlynn: based on how much sleep you got the night before and how much activity you did the day before, and it tells you how ready you are to, tackle the next day so every morning you get a new energy score after Samsung's calculated your sleep and your activity from the day before and it's like today you can take it easy or You should take it easy or then like you had a lot of rest and you did basically nothing yesterday you little lazy pig You do more today It doesn't say those words, but like your energy score being high means you can go on and go on a big hike or whatever.

Devindra: I love this idea, by the way, like I wish we had the actual tech to make this biologically like fully accurate, right? That would be like an implant or something. So you would have a little Mega Man, meter on your wrist.

So Oh, I have full hearts today. I have a full life bar. Let's go. Let's take on the world. We're all gaming characters

Cherlynn: now. Yeah. But the thing is, The main issue with this, and we're coming back again to the problem here, which is the Galaxy Watch Ultra, you mother pizza. It's like the Galaxy Watch Ultra is not only a chunky boy, it's like a chunkster on the scale of that we've established in previous episodes of the Engadget podcast, the watch itself, I have confirmed with Samsung last week, does not have wear detection.

It does not know whether it's on your wrist or not. This thing the Apple Watch does, just does, okay? The Apple Watch knows all the watches. It seems

Devindra: like a very basic feature for any smartwatch. Yes, it

Cherlynn: is a basic feature. And here's where the bigger problem with that is, right? Not only is it just chilling, when it's not on your wrist, therefore just draining its own battery.

It's also randomly detecting workouts when you're not wearing it. So if you put it like I did on my purse and I took a cab ride or something, it was like, Oh, you've been biking.

Devindra: We're tumbling.

Cherlynn: No, I haven't. I haven't, bro. No. And the other thing is, It doesn't have word detection so that one of the key features of the Galaxy Watch Ultra is how when you press down that orange quick button for five seconds, the emergency siren will go off.

Yeah. Do you know the number of times in my testing where the siren just going off in my backpack somewhere and I'm like embarrassed in the Singapore airport, I have a video of this. My mom was like, what is that sound sending me off to, by the way, like to go home to the, to us. And we were like, what is that sound?

And it's in my bag. Of course.

at 2 percent battery screaming with the emergency SOS. So that was frustrating, but to back to the point with the energy score, because that info from the Galaxy Watch Ultra was so inaccurate and messing up my entire activity history because of those phantom workouts, that my energy score was like, Oh, you worked out too much yesterday.

You took a lot of bike rides. Just don't work out as much today. I was like, huh? That's weird. It's not a problem if you like, take the time to go in and read and figure out what happened. But if you're just looking at your energy score and that's all you look at, you'll be like getting very inaccurate information.

So that's just. That's just one of like my bad experiences during testing. It's not a galaxy ring issue. It's a galaxy watch. Cause

Devindra: if you had another galaxy watch, not even the ultra, like you would still have the same data like management issue between both of them.

Cherlynn: And Mark, that was like, good to know that I can stick my watch on my cat to try to boost my score.

That's not, I don't want to sure. Boost your activity score, but not your energy score or your readiness score. But do name Charlie in the chat ask a good question, which is something I want to bring up to how good is the sleep tracking? So I like. The sleep tracking it was good. It was like mostly accurate, right?

I think as far as I can tell you how accurate my sleep stages are, right? It'll tell you how many hours you spent in REM, how much time you spent in deep, blah, blah, blah. Very standard stuff by now in the wearables and fitness sleep tracking market. I used to complain that companies like Fitbit, Google, Even Apple didn't do enough of contextualizing the insight you gain from how much time you spend in each sleep stage.

And now I think we're better, but like Samsung's kind of my first experience with this improved data. So not only does it tell me like you spent 11 percent of your sleep cycles in deep, it also will say this is a good amount for, restoring this, restoring that it compares well to other people in this age group.

Ideal number ideal amount of time is this. So like within one page, I can get a better sense of how well I slept, how much recovery I got overnight, which I like. I think that's more important than whether exactly to the minute, was it accurate about tracking how much time I was asleep? The only thing I could

Devindra: comfortable, like sleep device you've had?

Cause it's always been your like complaint with sleep trackers, right?

Cherlynn: Yeah. So this thing, maybe the fact that it's slightly loose helps, right? But that gets in the way of, like I said before, blood oxygen tracking is pretty inaccurate because it's so loose. They say in the app that you have to make sure you have a snug fit for accurate blood ox readings.

And I noticed when, so my index finger is a little meatier than my middle finger. So when I wear it on my middle finger to sleep, my blood ox levels The next day will be like 76 percent is like, as if I was dying of asphyxia. Where's the

Devindra: alarm somewhere to Oh my God. Oh my God. Yeah,

Cherlynn: it did not.

And it also did not really like flag anything huge in front of me the next day on the app. Something for Samson to work on there, but also stopped looking at that variable, right? Because I'm like, I know that it's because it's a little loose. So that is a d