Hands on: Movano Evie Ring review

The Movano Evie was first unveiled at CES 2023, but a whole year after, we’ve finally got hands-on with the women-focussed smart ring.

We’ve been tracking the smart ring launch for over a year, and as a new entrant to the smart ring market, there’s a lot of pressure on Movano to perform.

As a first generation, it’s going to battle with Oura, which has led the smart ring market since 2015.

But how does it stack up?

We spent some time with Movano Evie to find out, ahead of our full review which will land in the coming weeks.

Design

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When it comes to smart rings, size is king. And for all the press images and promo images, you just can’t really tell how chunky they are until you put one on.

The great news is that Evie ticks the box for a slim and sleek smart ring.

The rounded edges make for a sleek fit, right up there with the Oura Ring Horizon. In fact, the split design, which allows the finger to swell during the cycle and still offer a great fit, makes it seem even sleeker.

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It uses a “liquid metal” titanium finish, and is really lightweight – and tips the scales at just 3.2g.

Put next to existing rings, it’s of course bigger than your standard wedding or engagement band, but most people would be able to carry it off.

Analysis and metrics

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Diving into the app is where all the analysis happens. The main screen is a ring that fills with the core tracking elements of sleep, steps, active minutes and calories.

Next is the My Body screen that captures core metrics, such as HRV, respiration rate, SpO2 and body temperature – a collection of wellness stats that you’d expect from a health-focused wearables.

However, there doesn't appear to be the tracking of movement of these metrics against established baselines at present – which does make it slightly less useful as a wellness tracker.

Finally, there’s a prominent journal element, where users can log menstrual symptoms, as well as mood and other symptoms.

It’s not a basic setup – but there’s not a huge amount of analysis of wellness features out of the box.

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But Movano told us that as Evie learns about users over days and weeks, it will unlock 40 AI insights.

Some of these are simply identification of streaks of hitting daily goals, but more advanced insights could be linking mood to the menstrual cycle.

A word on that. Despite the presence of a temperature sensor, the Movano Evie ring doesn’t use skin temperature to identify your cycle – as we’ve seen on Apple Watch, Galaxy Watch and Oura Ring.

It’s not yet a fertility planner or contraceptive product, which requires FDA approval.

Like much of the Movano experience, the company has big ideas for how this data could be leveraged down the line. But for now, this is a first gen product, and it wants its users to come on a journey and get the basics right.

Workout tracking is on-board – but the implementation here looked very basic – with workouts not even tagged by type. So this won’t be replacing your Garmin or Whoop quite yet.

Battery life and charging

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One neat difference between Movano Ring and the likes of Oura and Ultrahuman is the charging case.

Rather than using a puck, the Evie Ring uses a small case, which can power up to 10 charges. A full charge takes about an hour.

The battery life itself goes between 4+ days for the smaller rings and 6+ days for the larger models. So you could easily go on holiday with the case, and not need to plug in for the entire trip.

The case itself hasn’t quite got the same snazzy appeal as the ring, and is a bit of a cheap plasticky box that could do with a bit more finesse. But if this is the main design criticism of a smart ring, Evie has done pretty well.

Verdict

The Evie Ring passes the initial test of being a sleek and good looking smart ring that impressed us in our first look.

The data and accuracy will need longer to test – and while our sample is incoming – it will take a month of testing to start assessing how useful and insightful the Evie is to our lives.

The Movano team have huge ideas for where its smart ring can go – but it’s core to remember this is a Gen 1 product, and some applications and analysis will lag the likes of Oura and Whoop. 

So users may need to be patient for Evie to offer a best-in-class experience for things like daily readiness, sleep, wellness tracking, menstrual tracking.