Circular Brings Payments, Wellness Tracker, and Alarm Clock to its Ring 3 Series
Circular’s Ring 3 Series Wants to Be Your Wallet, Wellness Tracker, and Alarm Clock, All at Once
Smart rings have spent the last few years quietly getting smarter, but Circular’s newest launch might be the category’s biggest leap yet. At IFA 2026 in Berlin, the French wearable company unveiled the Circular Ring 3 Pro and Circular Ring 3 Slim, and the headline feature isn’t a health sensor, it’s a payment chip.
Two Rings, One Big New Trick
Both rings pack an integrated NFC chip that lets wearers tap to pay with supported Visa and Mastercard cards; no phone, no watch, no wallet required. It’s a feature none of the major smart ring players, including Oura, currently offer, and Circular is framing it as proof that its rings can do more than just quietly log your sleep and heart rate.
Alongside payments, both models bring back Circular’s haptic vibration motor, which the company had dropped from more recent generations. It’s used for silent wake-up alarms, medication reminders, guided breathing cues, and vital-sign alerts, all without needing to glance at a screen.
Ring 3 Pro vs. Ring 3 Slim: Where They Differ
The Circular Ring 3 Pro is the flagship of the two, built for people who want deep health data. It includes:
- FDA-cleared single-lead ECG with AFib detection
- Blood pressure trend tracking
- Glucose trend estimates
- Advanced sleep analysis, HRV, SpO2, and skin temperature
- Up to 12 days of battery life
The Ring 3 Slim trims the feature set to hit a smaller, lighter form factor. It drops the ECG and blood pressure tracking but keeps the essentials: sleep, heart rate, HRV, SpO2, skin temperature, and activity monitoring, plus the same NFC payments and haptics as the Pro. Battery life comes in slightly lower, at up to 10 days. Both rings are built from titanium and stainless steel and are rated for water resistance up to 5 ATM.
Circular’s CEO, Amaury Kosman, explained the design split simply: the Slim exists because ECG hardware was the one component preventing a thinner ring, so it was the one thing cut.
The Catch: Not Everywhere, Not Yet
A few caveats are worth flagging for anyone eyeing a purchase. Neither ring has a confirmed price or release date, Circular says both are expected to ship in early 2027, with preorder details to follow “in the coming months.” It’s also unclear which region gets the rings first.
There’s also a regulatory wrinkle for the Pro’s marquee health feature. While its ECG and AFib detection carry FDA clearance in the U.S., the EU’s Medical Device Regulation requires a separate CE conformity assessment for arrhythmia-detection features, and as of launch, no such CE marking had been announced. That matters here specifically because Circular is a Paris-based company that just unveiled the ring in Germany, so European buyers may not get the same functionality out of the gate as U.S. buyers.
Why It Matters
Oura’s dominance in the smart ring space has largely been about health tracking polish. Circular’s bet with the Ring 3 series is that payments and haptic convenience (the kind of everyday utility you’d expect from a smartwatch) can be the real differentiator. Whether that’s enough to shift the market remains to be seen, especially with pricing still unknown, but it’s a clear signal that the smart ring race is no longer just about who can track the most biometrics.
