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I tested this smart ring for women. Read this before you buy it
ZDNET's key takeaways
- At $269, the Evie Ring is an affordable smart ring that caters to women and their health and wellness tracking.
- The symptom and mood-logging features are great for people who want a comprehensive daily wellness check-in that coincides with their menstrual cycle.
- As a first-gen product, the Evie Ring falls short of using the health data it aggregates for helpful recommendations and actionable insights.
Movano's Evie Ring drummed up plenty of hype at CES 2023 when the smart ring space looked sparse but promising. The ring, a first-of-its-kind product designed for women, gained placements on tech publications' lists of the best products and was a hot tech product to watch.
Also: The best smart ring for fitness junkies beats the Oura in 4 major ways
Now that the initial hype is over, and the smart ring market has ballooned, how well does the ring do on a woman's finger compared to its ever-growing list of competitors? I wore the Evie Ring to find out.
View at Evie RingAt $269, the Evie Ring is less expensive than its competitors' starting prices. Industry mainstay Oura retails its Heritage ring, the brand's cheapest ring, for $299 (alongside the $6 monthly subscriptions members have to pay, which technically raises the yearly price by $72). The Ultrahuman Ring Air, an Oura competitor with a more bro-ey and techy vibe, retails for $349. RingConn, another competitor, is $10 more than the Evie Ring, at $279.
The comparatively low price of the Evie Ring could entice new customers, specifically women unfamiliar with the space who want to dabble in health-tracking smart rings, but on a smaller budget.
Also: The best smart rings you can buy
There are a few features that shine bright. Chief among them is Evie's symptom and mood-logging tab. The symptom-logging feature is competitive and thoughtful, and it helps you to understand the ebbs and flows of your moods throughout your menstrual cycle. Each day you can log your energy level and mood level, tag certain adjectives like "calm," "depressed," "anxious," and more, document your menstrual flow and your symptoms, and add tags like whether you drank alcohol, are sick, or are working through an injury.
As you log these results month after month, you should get a better sense of your moods throughout your cycle and begin to understand your emotional and physical well-being patterns.
I enjoyed filling in these results and liked the comprehensive nature of the daily log. All the questions you'd want to ask yourself and physiological factors to consider each day are on one page, which makes it easier to connect the dots, whether the dots you're connecting are alcohol-related fatigue, your anxious behavior, or the nine hours of sleep and your boatload of energy. The symptom-logging tab is the crown jewel of the Evie Ring's features.
You can also set goals using the app, such as getting a certain number of active minutes per day or hours of sleep per night. As I set goals and logged my daily moods and symptoms, I began to understand that the ring is for women who are all-in on self-improvement and want to use a smart ring and approachable app to do so. The user interface of the app is without a doubt aesthetically pleasing and simple to understand.
Also: These Oura Ring updates are all in on women's health
The Evie Ring is the most stylish smart ring on the market. While wearing it out and about, many friends were surprised it was a smart ring. Unlike other smart rings, which look like a plain wedding band, the Evie Ring has a funkier shape that balances style and functionality. The ring looks like an accessory you'd find at a Boho boutique.
Unfortunately, what you gain in a more affordable, stylish ring, you lose in helpful features and convenient specs that provide a holistic understanding of your health.
Also: How we test smart rings at ZDNET
The Evie Ring comes with a white charging case that, in my experience, charges the ring in no time. In less than an hour, my ring's depleted battery life had jumped to 64%. Not too bad. This brings me to the ring's first downside: the battery life. Evie's battery life is about four days, while its competitors can last five to seven days. On top of that, once the Evie Ring hits a low battery status, a few of its features are inaccessible, including workout logging and SPO2 checking.
The lower battery life made it difficult to continuously log my data without a gap of a day or two. I'd forget to charge the ring every other day and wear it dead, so some of my daily health data was lost in these gaps. If you're a daily tech charger, you probably won't have the same issues I did.
While Evie nails the ring and app design, I'd love to see more energy put into building features and health data tools that give users a clearer understanding of their wellness.
Every smart ring can measure your activity levels and sleep patterns, and grab your heart rate and variability, but those capabilities mean nothing if the data isn't presented in a way a regular user can easily understand.
Review: Oura Ring: Still the best smart ring to beat (for now) in 2024
One day, when I was sick, I wore the Evie and the Oura Ring. The Oura Ring had taken my sleep and heart rate data, among other biometrics, to warn me that I should take it easy. Of course, I still had to make a tag that signaled to the ring that I was sick, but it helped me understand these data figures and make a wise choice about my health and wellness.
On the Evie app, you don't see these sorts of suggestions. You see insights into what your heart rate is and why it matters. If you truly wanted to understand your health data, however, you'd have to research to figure out what a higher resting heart rate means, whether you should rest and take it slow after a bad night of sleep, or whether you got the appropriate amount of deep sleep.
On the ring's next update, I'd love to see a sleep and readiness score feature or any feature that aggregates the health data the ring collects and offers recommendations or summaries of daily wellness. This addition would make the data, like the sleep cycle graphs and activity metrics, more digestible and helpful, providing a greater picture of overall health.
Even though the Evie Ring is still the only smart ring I know specifically designed for women, other smart ring brands include features that cater to women's health and biometric data-tracking to understand their menstrual cycle and monthly behaviors. The Oura Ring, for example, recently announced three new features coming later this month for greater insights into your menstrual cycle, including a cycle awareness readiness score and updated insights and reports.
ZDNET's buying advice
If you want a stylish smart ring with accurate health tracking, a useful mood and symptom-logging feature, and entry-level smart ring tech, I think the Movano Evie Ring is a great place to start. It's newer and much cheaper than its competitors, with a few kinks to work out. If you want to dip your toes into the smart ring space and look stylish, the Evie Ring could be your match.
On the other hand, while women might pay less for the Evie Ring than they would for other smart rings, I'd suggest laying out a little extra for another smart ring, whether that's the Ultrahuman Ring Air or the Oura Ring, for longer battery life, comprehensive health insights, sleep and recovery scores, and data that gives you a clear picture of your day-to-day wellness. In this case, an extra $100 goes the distance for features, battery life, and regular wearability.