A fantastic subscription-free smart ring

Price

The RingConn Gen 2 costs $359, making it more expensive than the cheapest available Oura Ring 4, which starts at $349/£349. It’s cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Ring, which sits at £399/$399. 

Like Samsung’s smart ring and unlike Oura’s, you only pay for the RingConn Gen 2 hardware with the companion smartphone app, with all the software features accessed through it all available for free.

It’s worth mentioning the RingConn Gen 2 Air ($238.80), which is a cheaper alternative to the Gen 2 and offers a similarly sleek design, though it misses out on features like the new sleep apnea mode and a portable charging case.

Design 

• Available in four colours
• 9 sizes available
• Free sizing kit available

The RingConn Gen 2 comes in a good array of colours and in plenty of sizes, with a free sizing kit available if you want to get a sense of what the ring is like to wear before you pick the one you’re going to stick with.

When you’ve settled on your size, you’ll get a ring made from a titanium alloy with a PVD coating and medical-grade epoxy inside to reduce the chances of it causing any sort of skin irritation. I haven’t found the ring uncomfortable to wear at all, and unlike some other smart rings, it doesn’t seem to pick up scratches as easily.

If you like the idea of a smart ring that’s both supremely slim and light, that’s exactly what you get here. You’re looking at a ring that weighs 2-3 grams, depending on size, and measures just 2mm thick.

To make it truly wearable at all times, it carries an IP68 waterproof rating, which does make it safe to submerge in water up to 100 metres. I’ve kept it on while showering and for pool and sea swims, and it’s continued to work as usual after taking a dip.

Like the first RingConn, the Gen 2 uses a portable charging case that uses a USB-C to USB-C charging cable to keep the ring powered up.

RingConn beat Samsung by using a charging case for its ring first. While it might not have that transparent look you get with Samsung’s Galaxy Ring case, it lets you carry the ring around with you when not in use while topping up the battery.

Health and fitness tracking 

• Tracks heart rate, steps, sleep and stress
• First ring with sleep apnea monitoring feature 
• Four dedicated workout modes

At its core, the RingConn tracks and monitors many of the same things that other rings do.

It has its own optical-based sensor setup that sits in the interior of the ring, which can track your heart rate, SpO2 levels, heart rate variability, and delve a little more into your stress. You can turn to it to track daily steps and monitor sleep data like sleep stages, heart rate and generate sleep scores to assess how good that night’s kip actually was.

For step tracking, the RingConn Gen 2, like the first version, seems up to the task. I’ve been wearing it alongside rival smart rings and smartwatches and daily step totals have been largely in line. Reviewing that data in the companion app is fine too and is nicely presented. 

When you take it to bed, again, there are some similar sleep monitoring features on offer. Think sleep stages, including the important REM sleep stage, as well as metrics like heart rate and temperature.

I’ve been wearing it to bed with the Oura Ring, which I consider to be one of the best wearable sleep trackers. For data like sleep duration, stages and additional metrics like heart rate, the Gen 2 has offered similar data and rarely seemed out of line with Oura’s own solid sleep tracking.

Sleep gets the main new feature, which is sleep apnea detection. It’s designed to detect interruptions in breathing during sleep through monitoring your SpO2 levels. The app will notify whether it has noticed something that might suggest a risk of sleep apnea. 

Now RingConn hasn’t said this is a medically-approved feature, and also requires you to enable the tracking from the app first. On most nights, the app said there were no issues. There was a night that picked up some mild risk of sleep apnea, but given that this feature doesn’t have any sort of regulatory approval, I’m not sure how much I’d fully put my trust in it.

If you want to track your exercise, there are currently four dedicated workout modes that cover running (indoors and outdoors), outdoor cycling and walking. As there’s no GPS support here, it’s mainly about tracking heart rate during those activities.

In my running and walking test, the heart rate data wasn’t all that bad, looking at the average and maximum readings compared to a heart rate monitor chest strap. I’m still sceptical, though, of the impact of movement on heart rate and whether it’s the kind of data I’d wholly trust from a training perspective.

Like the first RingConn, you’ll also find what it calls a Wellness Balance widget on the app, which essentially wants to help you achieve a good balance between the things the ring can track and then make suggestions on how to get things more balanced.

I’d say some of those suggestions and the presentation of this feature are examples of where RingConn perhaps lags behind the competition. Some who are starting on their health and fitness journey may find some of the advice useful, but I think this is a feature that could work better for the RingConn wearers, and hopefully it will improve.

It’s a similar story for a new AI chatbot that wants to help you make better sense of your health, fitness and wellness data. It feels very basic and not all that personalised. No doubt that will change. Right now, I’m not sure how useful it’s going to be to most people.

Battery life

• Up to 10-12 days of battery life 
• 0-100% charging in 1 hour and 30 minutes
• Sleep apnea mode drains the battery quicker

The original RingConn raised the bar in terms of battery performance on smart rings. While others have now caught up with the battery numbers attached to the first generation, things have got better on Gen 2.

This is a ring that can last well over a week and almost two weeks between charges.

It certainly does do that, as long as you’re not using the sleep apnea mode. If you do, battery life will be less than a week as it demands more from the ring’s sensors. If you’re not fussed about sleep apnea tracking, this is absolutely a smart ring that can go for weeks.

As mentioned, charging is done when you drop it into the accompanying charging case. That means it’s easy to top things up on the move. When the charging case is fully charged, it’s capable of giving you roughly 15-20 charges before the case needs to be recharged.

Should you buy it?