Ringconn Review – 2nd Generation Smart Ring

Lightweight, subscription-free and with an insightful app, Ringconn doesn’t quite match Oura, the market leader. You’ll grow to love the slightly odd shape and right from the first day you wear one, you’ll appreciate the market-leading battery life.

Buy: Kickstarter $209 (rrp $299)

The $200 Kickstarter price raised $3 million, surely over 14,000 backers can’t be wrong? A: Probably not. Don’t be too put off by Ringconn’s Kickstarter launch. This is the company’s second-generation product and they know what they are doing with smart ring technology. But do they have the commercial side of the business right? Despite an attractive introductory Kickstarter price, the company will raise the price in line with the competition. Even at a higher price, I could still recommend this ring as there is no ongoing subscription.

I’ve worn Ringconn for over a month and, as with its competitors, I’m not wholly convinced of the accuracy all of the time. In this dynamic market with new smart ring options appearing, should you wait for a 4th Generation Oura Ring, go for the latest Samsung Ring, or decide today?

Ringconn feels light and smooth on my finger, if anything its’ slightly squared-off circular shape works well and the compact size and quality finish compare well to all the other smart rings.

Ringconn Review – Why Buy A Smart Ring?

Buying a ring involves a great deal of personal preference for its aesthetics. Buying a powerful piece of tech adds complexity to understanding if you can trust it to do its job.

A smart ring is a discrete piece of tech that’s also more easily worn at night than a watch. Wearable technology is now sufficiently mature that this new class of products should be able to capture fairly accurate data on most aspects of your life to give feedback and insights into sleep, activity, stress and more. The tech is so miniaturised it can be easily added to a normal-looking lightweight ring.

Next, consider the practical aspects. Can it be worn for long periods without charging? A: Yes. Will it scratch? A: mine is Ok. Will its size get in the way? A: No

The bottom line is that for under $/£300, you should get a highly usable smart ring that’s a great 24×7 alternative to a bulkier watch or fitness tracker.

Ringconn – What sets it apart?

Here is a detailed comparison chart of 4 major smart rings available in September 2024. As you can see the most popular smart rings share the same high-level features. There is nothing to set them apart other than battery life and price, where Ringconn’s Kickstarter deal edges it for now

Going deeper, Ringconn’s app is amongst the best and it is one of the first to support sleep apnea detection. On a more trivial level, the handy charging case acts as a battery pack to charge your ring on the go.

Which Smart Ring Is Best for Me?

As an all-purpose tracker and your only piece of health tech, any of the main rings will do a good job. Ringconn would certainly be a sensible choice if you liked its looks.

If you are looking for a 24×7 stress tracker, again, they are all similar.

Whilst smart rings do record heart rate they are often unsuitable for accurate HR recording during vigorous exercise. Either the data is recorded too infrequently or it becomes inaccurate at higher levels when the sensor algorithms find it hard to distinguish and eliminate wrist motion and impact forces. In those cases, you are advised to get a dedicated sports device, at least for recording your sports.

Smart rings CAN be great for athletes though. Why? A: They are a great way to unobtrusively record HR and HRV at resting levels. Thus you can track your sleep quality, recovery and stress to assess how your body adapts to an exercise stimulus. Oura has probably done the most original science on resting physiology and its app is particularly good at sleep tracking, if perhaps a little too detailed. As an athlete myself, Ringconn and Oura do the job of measuring resting physiology.

Ringconn – Improvements In the New Model

As the following table shows, the new Ringconn iterated and improved key and subtle aspects of its design and features. It’s a solid improvement

RingConn Accuracy Review

RingConn is sufficiently accurate as a general tracker and performs similarly to Oura, the market leader.

Resting physiology is OK.

Whilst SpO2 was lower than expected, resting HR was typically correct and in line with other tools I regularly use. HRV was generally higher than my other tools but consistently supported plausible inferences from it. Time asleep/in bed was broadly correct. Whilst no sleep stage data is wholly accurate in wearables, Ringconn reported consistently higher volumes of Deep Sleep than my other sleep tools.

Other reviews of RingConn say that it underestimated calories burned and steps. I found the steps to be pretty accurate even properly accounting for running steps. However, RingConn appears to overestimate workout calories.

Here are the correlations of various factors, including Ringconn nightly HRV, to my waking physiology. The best correlations are linked to exercise duration (the distance correlation must be wrong as it adds running and cycling distances).

Here is an example of heart rate captured by the ring during an interval running workout and compared to correct Garmin data. As you can see, you can’t rely on a ring to correctly record activities.

RingConn App

The app has a good-looking daily dashboard with clickable tiles covering your wellness balance (beta), sleep, activity, stress, heart rate and sleep apnea. This dashboard approach is typical of similar products and a nice touch is the daily timeline included below the dashboard. You swipe from one day to the next, though typically you’ll only look at today’s page.

Various tips, badges and notifications will periodically appear as might messages that the ring is automatically syncing to the app. The potential volume of feedback from the app is huge and Ringconn has done an excellent job with the subtle and unobtrusive ways it interacts with me.

The app has many details and recommendations, usually a click away when needed, never cluttering the app’s aesthetics. The details you might want to explore include the constituents of the wellness score, every aspect of sleep with charts explanations and ways to personalise the info, written assessments of your physiology and recommendations for improvement, and trends over weeks, months and years.

Here is a selection of screens from the app to give you a feel for it working in dark mode.

Dashboard & Timeline

Wellness Balance & Detail

Sleep Details

Activity

Stress

Heart Rate

Sleep Apnea

Trend Charts

Battery Life & Charging

Claim: 10-12 days on a full charge and 150 days (about 140 more days) from the 500 mAh charging case.

I wore the ring for the first 6 days without charging and exercised for at least an hour every day. At the start of the 6th day, RingConn warned me to recharge and showed 18% remaining. Thus the claimed 10-12 day battery life appears fanciful. A more realistic 7-8 day claim would still be good compared to the competition. Expect it to degrade over time like my Oura Ring which is now down to below 2 days on a full charge.

One downside with smart rings is that the battery is non-replaceable. There will only be a certain number of recharges that any battery can go through so if you think about it, the products with the longest battery lives stand the best chance of also being the ones whose batteries exhibit the best longevity over the years ahead.

Expect a full recharge to take 2 hours.

RingConn – sizing and Options

When you order, you will be sent a sizing kit.

The ring comes in one design with 3 colour finishes and 9 standard US ring sizes.

Buy RingConn – Price & Availability

Be wary of Kickstarter launches. That said, I have the product and it’s good and this is a second-generation product from the company.

The initial production run of 12,200 was stated to be close to running out on 4 Sep 2024. That batch was targeted for a September delivery before the price reverts to $299.

Buy: Kickstarter $209 (rrp $299)