RingConn Smart Ring review

The RingConn Smart Ring is one of a flurry of Oura Ring rivals that have landed in the last year – as this wearable tech sub-genre hits the mainstream.

Coming ahead of the Samsung Galaxy Ring, RingConn raised over $1 million through crowdfunding in 2023. After getting rings out to backers, it has now made its health and fitness tracking ring available to all.

It promises similar features to the Oura Ring, minus the added subscription. It offers a week-long battery life, which is good news for anyone who doesn’t like the idea of charging a ring every couple of days.

There’s plenty going for RingConn here. So, is this one you should be wearing? Here’s our comprehensive take on the RingConn Smart Ring.

Price and competition

The RingConn Smart Ring is a ring where you pay for the hardware, and you don’t need to pay anything extra to get full access to its companion smartphone app (iOS or Android).

It’s a one-off $279/£220 price, which means it’s cheaper than the Oura Ring Gen 3 ($299 plus $6.99 monthly subscription). Compared to similar subscription-free rings, the Ultrahuman Ring Air costs $349, while the Circular Ring Slim will cost you $275.

It's not cheap, and you could buy a few wrist-based fitness trackers for that price.

RingConn Smart Ring: Design

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Oura has set the bar in terms of how good a smart ring can look. It’s not perfect, but as far as hiding away those sensors and components like the battery inside an elegant form factor that just doesn’t feel like a piece of technology, it gets most things right.

We feel similarly about RingConn’s approach to design. It understood the assignment here.

It’s not a fully round ring and has been squashed from the top and bottom, which offers a bit of interest and contour.

It’s about the same size, thickness, and weight as the Oura Ring 3 and uses titanium as the key material and seems to have done a much better job of fending off scratches than Oura and other smart rings we’ve tested.

Though, we’ve learned our lesson to take it off where the ring might be more susceptible to scratches, like using it in the gym for certain activities. You can pick up a protector that sits over the ring if you’re happy to spend an extra $29 on it.

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That titanium design comes in gold, silver, or black and supports ring sizes from US 6 up to 14.

We used the same ring size as the Oura, Ultrahuman, and Circular Smart Ring and the RingConn definitely offers the most secure and snug fit. It’s not going to spin around your finger, making sure that sensor array is always positioned in the right spot on the underside of your index digit.

That sensor array is made up of similar sensors to Oura, Ultrahuman, and Circular rings. There’s an optical sensor to track heart rate and heart rate variability to deliver stress insights.

You’re also getting the kind of accelerometer motion sensors you’ll find inside most wrist-worn trackers to track steps and detect when you’re asleep.

There's a temperature sensor to track skin temperature variations overnight.

The infrared sensor RingConn includes does seem a touch brighter than other rings we’ve tested that pack one, which can make it a bit more noticeable at night.

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RingConn says you should put it on your non-dominant hand and can place it on your middle, index, or ring finger. The noticeably snug fit does mean it’s a little more noticeable when it’s on, but it’s never been uncomfortable, irritating, or intrusive to wear at all.

It’s one you probably won’t have to take off unless you’re needing to charge it. It carries an IP68 certification, which does mean you can go swimming with it and keep it on when you jump in the shower too.

Alongside the ring, you’ll also get the charging case, which can retain charge and means you can carry and power up the ring on the move.

It’s not as small as other ring chargers, but it's nice to see RingConn do something different on the charging setup front.

RingConn Smart Ring: Health and fitness tracking

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RingConn is built to act just like a fitness tracker you’d wear on your wrist. It wants to keep track of how many steps you take, monitor sleep quality, and also keep an eye on your heart or variations in your skin temperature.

There isn’t anything here that’s new to smart rings and none of the features promise clinical-grade levels of monitoring.

If you care about tracking your exercise, whether that’s runs or gym time, then there isn’t really any sort of good support here just yet, with RingConn promising a workout mode in a future software update.

We took it for a run and the heart rate data was all over the place, so not one for fitness.

There’s more to come on top of that. RingConn wants to make it a better ring for women’s health tracking and dealing with stressful periods of your day.

As far as what it can do now, we’d say it does a solid job of delivering those fitness and wellness features you’d associate with most wrist-based fitness trackers.

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When we used it alongside the Oura Ring Gen 3 and a Garmin Forerunner 965, daily step counting totals weren’t wildly out from the two other wearables, so that’s a good start.

The app will give you a breakdown of those steps across your day and let you look at longer periods to view trends or patterns. It’s pretty simple stuff in fitness tracker terms with no real features in place to motivate or push you to move more.

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The heart rate performance fared well for continuous monitoring while the heart rate variability-powered stress monitoring that typically told the same story about our daily stress as Garmin’s stress tracking support.

That might be because we got a really good fit with the RingConn, and we found reliability of data (not during workouts) really strong.

Adding in those more mindfulness-focused features would help make these stress features seem more useful. Even a simple prompt of some kind when you’re feeling stressed would be welcomed.

In isolation, the tracking feels solid enough but what rival rings like Oura and Ultrahuman do is to package it into a few useful insights you can quickly absorb, take on board, and make key decisions about your day or even night.

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Right now, RingConn’s answer to that is what it’s calling your Wellness Balance and is a feature currently in beta testing.

This sits at the top of the main insights section of the app and aims to show if your sleep, stress, activity, and vital signs are well balanced essentially.

There’s a diagram, a comparison of scores attached to those four elements compared to your previous day.

It also offers exercise suggestions, though it’s kept pretty general and suggests areas you can improve that balance whether it’s sleep duration or better managing stress levels. 

This is a step in the right direction for RingConn but the presentation of that Balance insight needs to feel more concise.

The core tracking that underpins it feels good on the whole to make those added insights feel useful and offer some simple yet valuable guidance. It just needs some work and development on the software side. 

While building a great wearable is a hardware challenge, building a useful one is a software one. While RingConn has nailed the hardware, the software side doesn't feel as useful as Oura's. And that's a challenge it will have to overcome.

RingConn sleep tracking

Oura is one of the best sleep trackings out there – so ensuring sleep data is of the same quality is a big thing. And we're pleased to saty that RingConn's tracking stood up.

We usually recorded within 15 mins total duration of Oura Ring Gen 3, which is an excellent performance. Many smartwatches – even premium ones from Garmin – can estimate over an hour extra duration. That's not necessarily bad if you sleep score analysis works well, but if you want to make meaningful improvements to your rest, getting an inflated picture isn't going to help.

When it comes to taking the RingConn to bed, this is where arguably it does its most detailed level of tracking.

Along with sleep data like duration, quality, and sleep stages, RingConn will also capture heart rate variability, SpO2 levels, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and heart rate.

Again, these are the types of metrics that Oura and other rings can also record. We found that sleep data like sleep stage breakdowns were similar to those captured by Oura.

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RingConn tended to estimate our heart rate slightly higher than our usual baselines. It's not a bad thing, and it was consistant, which is the main thing.

The sleep data available in the app is pretty extensive on the whole, though thankfully does a good job of explaining key aspects of your sleep stats or whether you’ve met your target sleep goals.

RingConn Smart Ring: The app 

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Like other rings and unlike wearables with screens, the emphasis on the app experience is huge. This is where you track your progress and absorb any insights on offer. The companion smartphone app (iOS and Android) for the RingConn is clearly an area that could improve, particularly on the presentation side.

The main insights page has a shortcut to your calendar of data, the Wellness Balance feature, and sleep and activity tracking data next and your stream of health data below that.

There’s also shortcuts to go deeper into activity tracking, sleep and stress data and a separate place for additional insights. There’s just a lot going on here.

Syncing data is at least nice and quick and Ringconn will store up to a week of data if you can’t sync it straight away for any reason.

There is support to sync data to Apple Health and Google Fit, and that’s a good start as bringing in stronger integrations will help to make the ecosystem feel more in tune with everything you do during the day.

It's obviously a big positive that everything is free to access and hopefully it will stay that way.

Some simple tweaks and a general tidy would make the RingConn app instantly more likeable, while growing the third party app support would boost its appeal too.

RingConn Smart Ring: Battery life

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If you like the idea of wearing a smart ring that you won’t be charging as much as your phone or a full-fat smartwatch, the RingConn can go further than most rings in between charges.

RingConn says its smart ring is capable of lasting for an entire week – and that's significantly longer than rings including Oura, Ultrahuman, and Circular, which will last a few days.

In our testing RingConn typically lasted five days.

There doesn’t seem to be the same level of battery drop-off during sleep monitoring compared to other rings where it’s arguably doing some of its most intensive data tracking.

It also takes around an hour to get from 0-100% battery. While you won’t get any indication of battery status on the ring, it’s nicely displayed inside of the companion app, giving you a clear sense of the type of battery life you can expect based on the current battery level.

The charging case is bigger than other rings, but does keep it securely in place and enables you to charge it on the move, or while you're away on holiday. RingConn also says the case can recharge the ring 18 times – which is seriously impressive and somewhat justifies the size.