A budget-friendly ring for Amazfit fans

Price

The Amazfit Helio Ring cost £269/$199 at launch, but at the time of writing, it has dropped to £109.90, making it comfortably one of the cheapest smart rings available. As already mentioned, you only pay for the ring, as access to the software via the Zepp companion smartphone app is free. 

Compare that to the Oura Ring 4, which starts from $349/£349 and also requires a $5.99/£4.99 a month subscription, and the Helio looks even more of an affordable buy.

Design 

• Available in 3 sizes
• Only one colour option available

One thing you’ll need to accept with the Helio Ring is that it only comes in one colour and is only available in three sizes. Those are sizes 8, 10 and 12, and thankfully, I was able to get a size that worked. It’s not going to be the case for everyone, and it’s surprising that the sizing range isn’t greater.

What I can say is that this is a smart ring that doesn’t look like an Oura Ring, Samsung Galaxy Ring or most other smart rings. It’s a titanium design that measures 2.6mm thick and is water resistant up to 100 metres, so you can keep this one on for swimming and showering.

It’s definitely one of the bolder-looking smart rings out there and has been perfectly comfortable to wear day and night and during exercises where you might need to whip it off. There’s a noticeable sensor bump, so you don’t entirely forget it’s there, but it’s never felt like one I’ve been desperate to take off.

The Helio charges on top of a proprietary charging dock that you simply drop the ring on top of. It’s a similar charging setup approach to the Oura Ring Gen 3 and 4 as well as Ultrahuman and RingConn Gen 2 Air smart rings. Unlike similar charging docks, you have to be very precise about that placement.

Samsung and RingConn have nailed it with their charging cases, so it’s a shame Zepp Health didn’t adopt a similar design.

Health and fitness tracking 

• Heart rate, temperature and EDA sensors
• Readiness scores 
• Works with compatible Amazfit smartwatches

The Helio Ring’s sensor array is led by Zepp Health’s BioTracker PPG optical sensor that unlocks the heart rate monitoring. There’s also an additional temperature and an EDA sensor, with the latter designed to track your emotions.

This is a smart ring that will track your sleep and steps like a smartwatch or fitness tracker. It also wants to delve a little more into monitoring stress, recovery and your preparedness to exercise.

Zepp Health also wants to be for people who want to track day and night, but also don’t like to keep a watch on in bed. It lets you fuse data from the ring and a range of compatible Amazfit smartwatches that include the likes of the Cheetah, T-Rex, Balance and even the budget Bip range.

I can see the value in merging data across devices, especially as there are some scenarios you wouldn’t want to wear a ring, such as lifting weights. It does mean you’ll need to invest in an Amazfit smartwatch if you haven’t already done so.

If you’re turning to it to track your steps, sleep and heart rate like other rings, it does a pretty good job of that. I wore it alongside other smart rings and smartwatches I count on to reliably deliver those metrics. So the likes of the Apple Watch and Garmin’s smartwatches.

Daily step count totals were in the same ballpark, and daily heart rate, excluding exercise, chimed well with rival trackers.

It’s a similar story for sleep tracking. I’ve worn alongside the Oura and Samsung smart rings and the Apple Watch, three devices I consider reliable sleep tracking performers. The Helio certainly holds up for data like sleep duration, sleep scores and additional metrics, including heart rate.

Looking beyond that tracking, you can look to insights like readiness scores and the emotion tracking to better guide you on how to spend your day. Those readiness scores are simply presented in the pretty, clean-looking, and intuitive Zepp app. Crucially, those scores were similar to the ones provided by similar scores offered by Garmin and Oura. 

As for the emotion tracking, changes in your emotional state are presented in a simple graph plotting your day’s emotional responses. It would be useful to have a clearer prompt when there are spikes in those emotional responses. It’s currently tagged as a beta feature, so maybe that will be worked into that particular tracking support.

Battery life

• Different battery capacity depending on ring size
• Up to 4 days of battery life
• Fully charges in under 2 hours

If you want the smart ring with the best battery life, the Helio simply won’t give you that.

Zepp Health says you should enjoy up to 4 days between charging, which is somewhat short of what the Oura Ring 4 (up to eight days) and rings like the RingConn Gen 2 (up to 10-12 days) can offer. The Helio Ring definitely comes up short on both of those rings.

I found it lasted closer to 2 or maybe 3 days, depending on what tracking features are in use. Like Amazfit smartwatches, opting to enable the most advanced sleep tracking or continuous emotion tracking results in a quicker battery drain.

There’s talk of fast charging here, though dropping it onto the charging dock can take approximately an hour and 40 minutes to fully power up. That doesn’t sound especially fast to us.

Should you buy it?