What’s the deal?
The Amazfit Helio Ring is on sale for $170 (save $30) during Amazon’s Presidents’ Day sale. That’s 15% off on Amazfit’s flagship smart ring.
Also: The best Presidents’ Day tech deals live now: Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and more
ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The Amazfit Helio Ring<!–> is available now in two sizes for $299.99.
- It’s comfortable, attractive, and syncs with Amazfit smart watches.
- The battery life only lasts four days, the Zepp smartphone software is confusing, and active heart rate readings were inaccurate in my testing.
As a fan of smart watches, I wear one on each wrist on a daily basis. But I don’t like wearing watches to bed, as they get tangled in the sheets and light up when you’re trying to fall sleep. This has left me without a way to track sleep metrics, until I started using smart rings.
Also: The best smart rings you can buy: Expert tested
I tested the Oura Ring a few years ago, and I found that it was the best device for me to capture sleep and health data because of its unobtrusive form factor. The problem is that Oura’s sleep data doesn’t interface with my sports watch, requiring me to run two different apps to get the full picture of sleep and health data.
So when I met the folks at Amazfit at CES in January, I was excited to see their plans to integrate the Helio Ring–> into the Zepp ecosystem along with the data from the Amazfit smartwatches. Could this be the complete solution for understanding your health and wellness?
I spent about 10 days with the new Amazfit Helio Ring<!–>, along with the Amazfit Cheetah Pro Kelvin Kiptum Commemorative Edition smart watch to find out.
The Amazfit Helio Ring is available for $299.99 in sizes 10 and 12, although more sizes will launch in the future. The ring’s sole available color is called titanium, even though it has a warm, slightly bronze tint to it.
Also: The best smart ring for fitness junkies beats the Oura in 4 major ways
I tested the size 12 titanium alloy ring, which weighs just 3.82 grams, with an 8mm width and 2.6mm thickness. It is completely round, with no flat spots, unlike other smart rings. The ring also has a 10 ATM grade for water resistance and is powered by a 20.5 mAh battery with a wireless ring charging dock very similar to the same method used by other smart rings.
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The ring includes a PPG heart rate sensor, 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope, temperature sensor, and EDA sensor, so there is a lot of technology packed into this small wearable device. Amazfit advertises up to five days of battery life, but in my testing I’m seeing about 25% battery consumption per day. For comparison, I typically charge the Oura Ring about once per week, so the battery life is a bit lower on this device.
The Helio Ring and an Amazfit watch both sync to the Zepp smartphone application, which employs its built-in algorithms to provide the appropriate health data. Wearing just the ring to sleep, as designed, reveals a readiness score, sleep score, sleep resting heart rate, sleep heart rate variability (HRV), and recovery time. A further breakdown of your sleep, including time and percent in deep and REM sleep, appear on the sleep tab of the Zepp app.
The app is powerful, but it’s not the most intuitive, with an overabundance of settings, customization options, and data views that can result in spending too much time trying to find what you’re looking for. I’ve found there are multiple ways to access your data, it just might take some time to discover which way is best for you.
Also: Why I wear this $220 smartwatch even after testing Garmin and Apple watches
While wearing multiple devices all at once to compare, I found the Helio Ring–>
