We give the finger to Ring, the pointless and rather ugly gesture control wearable for iPhone, at CES 2015.
One thing that the iPhone definitely didn’t need was gesture control, but the simply-titled Ring by Logbar adds just that, in a completely pointless fashion and with little emphasis on style. This chunky Bluetooth wearable slips onto your index finger and allows you to make gestures to control your phone and connected devices – for instance, wave your finger in an ‘S’ pattern to change the volume or form a circle to turn on a smart lightbulb.
Design-wise, the Ring is a bulky monster that is anything but bling. It’s so chunky that it pushes your index finger away from your middle finger, but it’s also made of plastic so it looks and feels cheap. I also almost suffered a minor coronary when I tried to pull the thing off and it wouldn’t budge. Blame the hot show floor for making my mitts all sweaty and bloated, but it took some serious tugging to get it off again. I was close to hunting down some kind of smart pocket knife to saw my own digit off.
As for the gesture control itself, you have to push in a dinky button on the side of the Ring before you form each gesture, then release it when you’re done. We managed to get it working almost every time, but we saw plenty of other journalists who couldn’t even get it to work once, so it’s clearly not the most intuitive of solutions.
And even if it did work every time, why would you ever need to use it? You want to change the volume on your phone? Just push the buttons on the side of the damn thing. Or if it’s in your pocket or bag, why not get wireless headphones with controls built in, so you look less like a massive idiot? The only reasonably useful feature is the vibration function for notifications, but we’d rather go without.
Believe it or not, there’s actually a Ring rival coming soon, which was also shown off at CES. The Mota smart ring wasn’t quite ready to be played with, but it appears to feature an actual screen and is even chunkier than the Ring, which is quite a feat. No UK release date for that one, sadly.
You can grab yourself a Ring right now for a ridiculous $269, from Logbar’s website.
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