RingConn Gen 2 Review: The Best Value For Money Smart Ring?

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I’ve been wearing the RingConn Gen 2 for two weeks and have been suitably impressed. It doesn’t do anything revolutionary, but what it does, it does well. And the price. Well, that’s the killer point.

If you’ve never worn one before, a smart ring sits on your finger to monitor your vital health statistics, sleep quality and track workouts. They’ve blown up in popularity recently with Oura leading the way. But more smart rings are hitting the market, including from RingConn which began as a crowdfunding project.

The RingConn Gen 2 is the second product the company has released, and I think it might be the best value-for-money smart ring you can buy. Here’s why!

Key Information

Design and durability

There’s a problem with smart rings. The metal used to coat the exteriors often gets scratched and, more annoyingly, scratches other things remarkably easily. Like any ring you wear, it will pick up knocks and scratches, but some smart rings scratch worse than others.

In Mark’s Ultrahuman Ring AIR review and Samsung Galaxy Ring review, you can see how affected they were by normal use. One even scratched his car!

I can report that I haven’t experienced this yet with the RingConn Gen 2. The outer coating is made from a Titanium alloy which already separates it from its competitors. Most rings, including Oura, use straight Titanium which gives a premium finish but leads to metal-on-metal contact issues.

The RingConn Gen 2’s Titanium alloy undeniably produces a less premium feeling and looking finish. Pure Titanium just exudes a certain vibe, the RingConn almost feels like plastic. But! It also means the RingConn is far less likely to scratch things and that the scratches it does pick up are much smaller and less noticeable.

In my experience, the only thing that has scratched the Gen 2 is the rough metal on dumbbell grips. More on that later.

In terms of looks, I’ve been testing ‘Future Silver’; a reflective chrome-like style which looks great but is more showy. If you want people to notice and ask about your ring, this is the colour. I think the ‘Matte Black’ option looks best, but it may show scratches more obviously.

If I’m honest with you, all of these smart rings look basically the same. If you really want a Titanium finish then the RingConn Gen 2 offers that. But I’ll take less-scratchy over that any day of the week!

Comfort

The RingConn Gen 2 is incredibly light, mainly because of it’s use of Titanium alloy, weighing about 2 grams, which is comparable to the UltraHuman Ring Air. An Oura ring weighs closer to 4/5 grams.

As such, you hardly notice it when you’re wearing it. It fits best on your index or ring finger but you can make it fit on your middle finger depending on your knuckle size.

The only time you notice the RingConn Gen 2 is when you are grasping something. Smart rings in general are chunkier than normal metal rings so they protrude away from the finger more.

On the interior of the ring, you will find the sensors the Gen 2 uses to read your vitals. Unusually, RingConn has opted to include two raised bumps that contact your skin. These bumps are unnoticeable when the ring is sitting on your finger but it makes removing it quite difficult and uncomfortable.

No smart ring has a completely smooth interior, but RingConn’s sensors are more prominent than most.

Health and fitness tracking

The RingConn Gen 2 is a tale of two rings when it comes to tracking. It tackles health well but is let down in the fitness department.

It continuously tracks your heart rate, blood oxygen levels, heart rate variability, skin temperature and respiratory rate. The Gen 2 also monitors your sleep quality to provide an overall sleep score. Impressively, the RingConn Gen 2 also includes sleep apnea monitoring.

The sleep tracking was good for the most part. Although it definitely recorded more moments of wakefulness than actually happened on some nights.

All of these stats are presented nice and visually in the RingConn app in graphs. Your activity, sleep, relaxation status and vitals are combined to show you your ‘Wellness Balance’. Very tidy and simple.

The RingConn Gen 2 also keeps tabs on your steps, calories burned and time standing, graphing all of this to compare with previous days.

We run into some issues with fitness tracking though. Mainly because, at the time of writing, you can only track running, cycling or walking activities. So if you’re buying a smart ring expecting a whole suite of activities, the RingConn Gen 2 may disappoint. There’s no automatic workout detection either.

However, when it can track an activity, it does it pretty well. My running tests have shown some solid consistency. I have compared one run to the Huawei Watch D2 below to see how they differ.

The GPS sometimes has a funny five minutes on the RingConn Gen 2 but it’s fine most of the time. It is slightly annoying to have to pull out your phone and open the app to track a run, but I’m sure soon we’ll have rings with haptic controls to solve this problem.

As a simple summary; health tracking = excellent, fitness tracking = limited but good when in use.

RingConn app

I’m going to say something very obvious now. Smart rings don’t have screens…yet. That means you interface with through an app, making that app a very important part of the user experience.

The RingConn app is brilliantly simple. However there is one thing I’d improve.

Everything is displayed visually and is easy to access. You can see instant data from things like sleep, then also see graphed long-term trends. You also earn progress badges for things like running 5km or sleeping well which adds a nice level of achievement.

The app also shows you the battery level.

Interestingly, the RingConn app has a built in AI assistant which summarises your data, gives you recommendations and answers a limited set of questions. It’s quite an impressive feature.

You can ask the assistant to draw up a health plan based on your own goals and data already collected which you can follow to lead a healthier, more balanced lifestyle. I think it’s a great use of AI on one that some will genuinely find helpful.

As RingConn gets more into the fitness tracking side of things, I’d love to see an ‘Activities’ tab added to the navigation bar so you can more easily find and start a workout type. But other than that, the app is great

Charging case and battery

The battery on smart rings is a much of a muchness if I’m perfectly honest with you. They all have long battery lives, so long that you will likely forget to charge them.

The RinConn Gen 2 has about ten days of battery life. In the box with the ring is a portable charging case that holds a further 15. In theory, that means you wouldn’t need to plug in your ring to charge it for 150 days. That enough battery for you?

The charging case itself is lovely by the way. It’s made of aluminium in a matte black colour and is small enough to fit in your pocket. The ring magnetically attaches to a dock in the middle and you’re away. You can also close the lid whilst charging meaning you can juice the Gen 2 on the go.

Top marks!

Is the RingConn Gen 2 the best value smart ring you can buy?

To answer this, we have to look at competitor pricing. The RingConn Gen 2 costs $299/£249.

As you can see, the RingConn Gen 2 is by far the cheapest smart ring you can buy and has no subscription fee. Now, it lacks some of the features of the likes of Oura and does have a less premium build and feel. But these things are mostly superfluous to me.

If you want a smart ring that can track your health vitals and some workouts alongside a mega battery life, then you can’t look past the RingConn Gen 2 for this price. You aren’t missing much by opting not to go for a competitor like the UltraHuman Ring Air and Samsung Galaxy Ring.

It really is a no-brainer; the RingConn Gen 2 is the best value smart ring we’ve ever tested.