Samsung's subscription-free smart ring and Google's dark web watchdog top the Innovation Index

Welcome to ZDNET's Innovation Index, which identifies the most innovative developments in tech from the past week and ranks the top four, based on votes from our panel of editors and experts. Our mission is to help you identify the trends that will have the biggest impact on the future.

Samsung's Unpacked July 2024 product event dominated the week in terms of innovations, but Google managed to sneak in with a security development.

Coming in at #1 this week was Samsung's Galaxy Ring launch, the company's first-ever smart ring. It shakes up the wearables space with AI sleep features, locating capabilities, cycle and heart health tracking, and more. Most notable to the ZDNET team, however, is the fact that it won't require a subscription, meaning users won't have to continue paying Samsung in order to access their ring data. As ZDNET Editor in Chief Jason Hiner wrote, the move could create a sea change in the wearables market by making it less plausible for competitors like Oura to paywall the valuable data found in consumers' ring fingers. 

In second place is Google, which is making its dark web monitoring feature -- previously limited to Google One subscribers -- available to anyone with a Google account. The feature monitors sites that search engines don't index for personal information, while alerting users on how to act if their data is found. The change marks a heightened awareness of data privacy and security, as leak after leak seems to plague the news cycle, especially with generative AI making hacks more common. Although it's subtle, Google's choice to make these insights free signals to consumers that they don't have to navigate the security landscape all by themselves. 

We go back to Samsung for innovation #3: the company impressed ZDNET's experts with the release of the Galaxy Z Fold 6. Its bold aesthetics and quality feel stand out in the smartphone series, and appear to have skipped a few generations: enough that ZDNET contributor Cho Mu-Hyun called Samsung "the leader of hardware in the Android camp." One standout feature shows translated text on the cover screen while the phone is half-folded for someone else to view. 

Closing out the Index are the rest of Samsung's new releases, specifically their seamless cross-product integrations. While not every individual device was a winner, the collection of foldable phones, smartwatches, earbuds, and a smart ring, the ZDNET team noted the interoperability of the Samsung ecosystem -- a core offering of Apple tech as well. Alongside on-device AI, this functionality is likely to become normalized for consumers across the Apple-Android spectrum and raise expectations for everyday tech.