The Amazfit Helio smart ring is a solid alternative to bulky or flashy workout watches. Our biggest gripe? The ring requires an additional subscription for detailed sleep tracking, and it only tracks four types of exercise. For $300 (or $150 when you buy an Amazfit smartwatch), the device is on par with others in the space, but Amazfit doesn’t have the track record of success that other fitness bands have.
However, if you are looking for a simple and affordable exercise watch and ring, this is the product for you.
Amazfit Helio
The Amazfit Helio Ring is a classic titanium ring with activity and heart rate sensors. It can tell you how far you’ve walked and how much you’ve slept, all in a simple package like a regular wedding band. The biggest issues are some size and battery issues, plus the $50 a year subscription required to unlock advanced features.
- Classic design
- Good activity and heart rate sensing
- Good battery life
- Only four activities were tracked.
- The ring is huge.
- The company is selling better sleep and fitness tracking features.
Price, availability and specifications
You can buy the Helio Ring from Amazfit. It currently comes in sizes 10 and 12 and retails for $300 or $150, with an Amazfit smartwatch priced between $300 and $500.
What are the good features of Amazfit Helio Ring?
Powerful array of sensors
Amazfit has long been synonymous with low-cost, high-performance workout watches. Its smartwatches borrow heavily from Apple and Casio’s design style but include many of the features you’d expect, like activity tracking. The rings are different, like the new Helio. The Amazfit Balance, for example, borrows a lot of design cues from Garmin’s Lily 2 smartwatch and other similarly simple workout watches.
The Helio ring features an array of sensors built along the inside of the ring that can measure heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and movement. It also has a basic temperature sensor and an electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor that could theoretically sense stress.
Related
Garmin Lily 2 Smartwatch Review: A Health Tracker Designed to Keep You Moving
After eight years, I may officially be an Apple Watch fan.
The Helio Ring doesn’t have a readout; it just has a bright green LED that you can occasionally see blinking from under your finger. Amazfit has designed the ring to be very discreet, and at 4 grams, you’ll barely notice it’s there. It’s nicely designed with a pattern of small dots across the entire surface and a single line at the “bottom” of the ring that shows you where to place it on the included or compatible charger. This line also indicates where the sensors are on your finger.
The Helio differs from the Oura in that the sensor LEDs are highly visible. While the Oura offers a quiet elegance, the Helio turns your finger into a microorganism when measuring your heart rate.
The real magic happens in the Zepp app. First, a few clarifications: Zepp is the parent company of Amazfit, which makes Amazfit devices and several services, including Zepp Aura. This means you’re using an app called Zepp to control an Amazfit device, which can be confusing.
Read our review
Oura Ring Generation 3 Review: A Luxury Health Tracker on Your Finger
The third-generation Oura Ring is good at what it does, but it starts at $300.
Furthermore, the Zepp app connects to multiple devices. If you have an Amazfit watch and a Helio ring, both devices will report activity. However, the Helio ring primarily reports on sleep activity and will give you a daily readiness score. This score tells you how you slept on a scale of 0 to 100. It also provides the number of steps you took, your resting heart rate, and a chart of your day, including periods of deep and light sleep.
The ring gives you what any other fitness tracker does without requiring a subscription. And the data it produces seems to be accurate; I tested the step data on an Apple Watch and got similar results. So the ring works as a standalone fitness product. However, Amazfit recommends pairing the device with one of its watches for more types of activities that supposedly require cadence sensors or GPS, like cycling and swimming. This is a fairly common trick in tech, but it’s the first time I’ve seen a ring manufacturer also recommend a watch product with such insistence.
Overall, this device works as advertised. It’s a nice, compact way to track your sleep and heart rate, and you can wear it while running to tell you how far you’ve come based on your steps. But let’s review some of the negatives before you hit buy.
What’s bad about Amazfit Helio Ring?
Increasing sales and app integration makes things frustrating.
The Helio costs $300 without a watch, which is on par with similar offerings from Oura and Ultrahuman. That price includes access to the app, but Zepp also sells something called the Zepp Aura, a sleep coach that uses AI to advise you on your wakefulness and daily sleep insights, and will even play some soothing music. You can also activate an AI chatbot that will tell you your sleep patterns in plain English.
The Aura feature costs $50 a year, and Zepp offers a free 14-day trial. The ring doesn’t need to be used in this extra way. In fact, it sounds a bit silly, and the advice — “relax before you go to bed” — is pretty silly. That Zepp offered this feature at all is a testament to the problem fitness wearables companies face when consumers buy a single device that lasts for years.
However, seeing the sales increase in the dedicated app spoils the deal a bit. Zepp also sells a fitness coach feature — an AI chatbot that tells you how to get fit — for last $50 per year. These features aren’t required to use the ring, but they certainly take up a prominent space in the app.
The app is also frustrating because it doesn’t offer many useful notifications. To check your sleep score or steps, you need to actively have the app running. Fitbit and other devices do this very well, and it’s a bit frustrating that Amazfit fails to do so. Many of these things could be fixed with a simple update, but that speaks to the experimental nature of this device.
Next, Amazfit only makes this ring in sizes 10 and 12. That means people with small or large hands won’t be out of luck, and the ring is a perfect fit if you’re a little larger than either of those sizes. Thankfully, the ring slipped on my finger without issue, but Amazfit’s competitors have larger sizes for larger hands. The Helio seems to be an experiment for the company, and this limited series is the first step in a larger rollout.
Battery life is also an issue. I didn’t receive any notifications that the battery was failing, so I wore the ring for a full day without collecting activity or sleep data. The app should offer more notifications, and the battery life could be much better. Competitors typically get around five to seven days on a charge, which is significantly more than the Amazfit’s four-day battery.
Finally, there’s the comfort. I’ve worn the Oura ring for years and never noticed it while exercising. I noticed the Helio right away, especially when lifting weights and climbing. The Helio is 8mm wide and 2mm thick. While that may not sound like much, the way Amazfit has designed the ring means it’s thicker and wider than a regular wedding band, and that slight difference in size is very noticeable.
I’ve worn this ring while doing various activities, including the aforementioned rock climbing and cycling. I don’t usually wear rings, but there’s something about the design of this ring that makes it look a little bigger than the Oura ring.
None of these issues are a dealbreaker, but they are enough to make you pause before choosing this device over a competitor. However, if you are a dedicated Amazfit user, this device may be the best thing you can add to your device collection.
Should you buy the Helio smart ring?
Price and technology make it competitive.
It’s still early days for the Helio, and at this writing, I’d advise potential buyers to look to Amazfit’s competitors. The watch performs well and provides exactly the information you’d expect, but given the price, size limitations, app upsells, and overall wearability, I’d say it’s not quite ready for the wider market.
Still, the ring does everything the other devices do, and if you’re looking for a sports watch and a ring, there’s nothing that beats this ring. The watch I tested with this ring, the $400 Amazfit T-Rex Ultra, was a great combination. Amazfit is a smaller brand and doesn’t have the Silicon Valley backing or reputation that some of its competitors do.
Still, this ring is a step up from the average smart device you can find on Amazon and isn’t much worse than the higher-end products we’ve mentioned before. With a little work, the Helio could be a great fitness device, and if you’re already part of the ecosystem, this is the perfect solution.
Amazfit Helio
The Amazfit Helio Ring is a classic titanium ring with activity and heart rate sensors. It can tell you how far you’ve walked and how much you’ve slept, all in a simple package like a regular wedding ring. The biggest issues are some size and battery issues, plus the $50 a year subscription required to unlock advanced features.
Related
Best Smart Rings in 2024
Unleash your finger’s full potential by discovering the best smart rings available today.
