Amazfit Helio Ring

The Amazfit Helio Ring is a decent entry level ring, but it is not something that is ready to replace a smart watch or Whoop band yet. Sleep and recovery tracking works well, but the activity tracking is limited and the Zepp app has some limitations.

The Amazfit Helio Ring is Chinese company Zepp Health’s entry into the smart ring space and aims to provide a cost-effective alternative to premium options like the Oura Ring and Samsung Galaxy Ring.

Design and usability

Zepp have used a titanium alloy for the ring which has allowed for a lightweight design – just 4g on the road.cc scales of truth. While it’s not exactly heavy, it has enough heft to sit comfortably on the finger and you are aware it’s there without it ever feeling like a burden. I did feel kind of naked without it after wearing it for a couple of months.

The Amazfit Helio Ring has a 2.6mm thickness so it sits unobtrusively on the finger, making it comfortable for all-day wear, including during sleep. This is where is excels for me because it is something I could happily wear all day and all night without it feeling particularly weird. I don’t like wearing my Apple watch at night because wearing a watch at night feels wrong, but for me a ring feels completely normal.

It comes in a single brushed silver finish in three sizes: 8, 10 and 12. I tried the 10 and it fit on my right-hand ring finger, but this size range is still a bit limiting.

Whilst the titanium construction is lightweight and comfortable, it is prone to scratches. As a parent of two kids under five, I am constantly grazing my hands and whilst it doesn’t show up so much on the textured upper of the ring, on the brushed lower element the scratches show pretty obviously.

The ring has a 10 ATM water resistance rating, which meant I could shower, do the washing up, or go swimming in it without any issues. I took this in the sea too and it showed no signs of damage from salt water either.

Health and fitness tracking

The Helio Ring is equipped with a range of sensors, including heart rate, SpO2, skin temperature, and electrodermal activity (EDA). They all sit on the inside of the bottom of the ring, which for somebody who tried out the very early fitness trackers – which took up most of my wrist and recorded a quarter of the metrics – is mind blowing.

These enable it to monitor various health metrics, such as sleep stages, stress levels and recovery. Sleep tracking is a particular strength. I found that the sleep score numbers that I got from the ring were pretty accurate, to the extent that I could use them to work out at what times during the night my daughter woke me up.

However, the ring’s fitness tracking capabilities are limited to four exercise modes: walking, running, cycling and treadmill workouts. However, the biggest issue I had in this area is that they don’t have automatic activity recording. The recording for cycling is also very basic compared to something like Strava or Garmin, so I was always reliant on other apps importing into Zepp to get my activities and to contribute to my scores. This didn’t always work, but more on that later.

I found that heart rate monitoring wasn’t at the same accuracy as my Apple Watch Ultra 2 or a chest strap for intensive activities, but was always within about 10 bpm which means that I could broadly use it to look at patterns. It was pretty good for resting heart rates and when there wasn’t the kind of variance that you tend to find when doing aerobic activities.

Battery life and charging

A fully charged Helio Ring offers up to four days of battery life, which is not as good as the Oura Ring or Samsung Galaxy Ring, both of which offer up to seven days. Charging is via a wireless dock and took less than two hours to reach full capacity when plugged into my computer.

Whilst charging and battery life was fine, I found that this was the most frustrating element of the ring because the Zepp app is not great at sending notifications, so I would frequently find that the ring had run out of battery during the day, but I would discover this only when I went to check my sleep score in the morning.

The app

The ring integrates with the Zepp app, which is available on both iOS and Android. The app itself looks good and is fairly intuitive, providing a lot of information on fitness, health, weight, heart rate etc.

I found that I could navigate easily and see graphs and data without a problem, but integrations were unpredictable. I would record a cycle on my Apple Watch, come home, check my Zepp app, and despite it being integrated to Apple Health where I could see the activity, it wouldn’t have registered. This also happened with Garmin and Strava. I tried to get help from Zepp on this, but did not get a reply to an email, which was frustrating. Eventually this started working, after about the weeks, when the app updated itself, but it wasn’t a great start as I either had to record a bike ride in two or three places or not get an accurate recovery score.

Similarly, the app’s notifications did not work properly, so I would get some notifications, some of the time, but other times those same notifications wouldn’t appear. As I mentioned above, this meant that I quite often ended up wearing a ring with no charge left because the low battery notification had failed to show.

Price and comparison

The ring comes with an RRP of £269 which is impressive compared to the best known smart rings on the market. There are shortcomings though, like the reduced battery life, the work-in-progress app and limited colour/size choices, but for this price, compared to others, that’s forgivable.

We haven’t looked at any other smart rings on the site so far, but the two most commonly known on the market are the Oura Ring and the Samsung Galaxy Ring.

The Oura Ring offers similar hardware functionality and looks. It has a superior battery life of seven days but also a higher RRP at £299 for the cheapest option. It comes in a larger range of colours and sizes, which means that you’re more likely to get a better fit.

The Samsung Galaxy Ring is more expensive again at £399. This comes in three colours and eleven sizes. It has the same battery life as the Oura ring but crucially is not compatible with Apple phones, which does create a significant barrier if you are an Apple user.

Conclusion

The Amazfit Helio is a wallet friendly smart ring that does the basics, but has a few drawbacks compared to its more expensive competitors. The functionality of it on the hand is impressive, the design is great and, for the money, the battery life is good enough.

However, it is let down by the unpredictability of the app, although it is worth noting that during the review period this was improved and some teething problems were fixed. The notification issue did still persist though, so hopefully that can be addressed soon to make this slightly easier to use.

Verdict

A good budget smart ring that tracks all the key recovery metrics, but the app is still a work in progress

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