Amazfit Helio Ring review: A smart ring that needs work (2024)

The Amazfit Helio smart ring is a solid alternative to bulky or obtrusive workout watches. Our biggest problem? The ring requires an add-on subscription for detailed sleep tracking, and it only tracks four kinds of workouts. For $300 (or $150 with the purchase of an Amazfit smartwatch), the device is on par with other devices in the space, but Amazfit doesn’t have the track record others have in the fitness ring market.

That said, if you’re looking for a super simple and potentially lower-cost exercise watch and ring combo, this fits the bill.

Amazfit Helio

6/ 10

The Amazfit Helio Ring is a classic-looking titanium ring that contains activity and heart rate sensors. It can tell you how far you walked and how you slept, all in a package that is as unobtrusive as a plain wedding band. The biggest issues are some sizing and battery problems, plus the $50-a-year subscription required to unlock advanced features.

Pros

• Classic styling
• Good activity and heart rate sensing
• Good battery life

Cons

• Only four activities tracked
• Ring is bulky
• The company upsells better sleep tracking and fitness features

$299 at Amazfit

Price, availability, and specs

You can buy the Helio Ring from Amazfit. It currently comes in sizes 10 and 12 and sells for $300 or $150 with a $300 to $500 Amazfit smartwatch.

What's good about the Amazfit Helio Ring?

A solid array of sensors

Amazfit has long been synonymous with lower-cost, high-performance workout watches. Their smartwatches borrow heavily from Apple and Casio’s design style but include plenty of the features you’d expect, such as activity tracking. Rings like their new Helio are different. For example, the Amazfit Balance borrows a lot of design cues from Garmin's Lily 2 Smartwatch and other similarly understated exercise watches.

The Helio ring features a set of compact sensors along the inside of the ring that can measure heart rate, blood oxygen level, and motion. It also has a basic temperature sensor and an electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor that, in theory, can sense stress.

The Helio ring has no readout; it just has a bright green LED you can occasionally see blinking from under your finger. Amazfit designed the ring to be very discreet, and at 4 grams, you barely notice it’s there. It’s nicely styled with a pattern of small dots all over the surface and a single line on the “bottom” of the ring that shows you how to place it on the included or a compatible charger. This line also indicates where the sensors should be on your finger.

The Helio is different from the Oura ring in that the sensing LEDs are very visible. Whereas the Oura rings offer muted elegance, the Helio rings turn your finger into ETs when measuring your heart rate.

The real magic happens in the Zepp app. First, here is a bit of explanation: Zepp is Amazfit’s parent company, which produces Amazfit hardware and several services, including Zepp Aura. This means you’re using an app called Zepp to control a device from Amazfit, which could be confusing.

Further, the Zepp app connects with multiple devices. If you have an Amazfit watch and a Helio ring, both devices will report activity. The Helio ring, however, primarily reports on sleep activity and will give you a daily Readiness Score. This score tells you how you slept on a scale from 0 to 100. It also offers the number of steps taken, your resting heart rate, and a chart of your day, including deep and light sleep periods.

The ring gives you what every other fitness device gives you without requiring a subscription. The data it produces appears to be accurate; I tested the step data against my Apple Watch and got similar results. Therefore, the ring works as a standalone fitness product. However, Amazfit recommends pairing the device with one of their watches to get more activity types that presumably need cadence or GPS sensors, like biking and swimming. This ploy is fairly common in the tech space, but it’s the first time I’ve seen a ring manufacturer also recommend a watch product so adamantly.

Overall, this device works as advertised. It’s a nice, compact way to track your sleep and heart rate, and you can wear it on a run to tell you how far you’ve gone based on your step count. But let’s go into some of the cons before you click the “Buy” button.

What's bad about the Amazfit Helio Ring?

Upselling and app integration make things frustrating

The Helio costs $300 without a watch, which is on par with similar offerings from Oura and Ultrahuman. This cost includes app access, but Zepp is also upselling something called Zepp Aura, a sleep coach that uses AI to give you advice on mindfulness and daily sleep insights, and will even play some soothing music. You can also activate an AI chatbot that tells you about your sleep patterns in plain English.

The Aura feature costs $50 a year, and Zepp offers a 14-day free trial. This upsell isn’t necessary to use the ring. In fact, it seems a little silly, and the advice — basically “wind down before you go to bed” — is pretty trivial. That Zepp is offering it at all is a testament to the problem companies face in the fitness wearable space when consumers buy one device that lasts them for years.

However, seeing an upsell in the dedicated app does sour the deal a little. Zepp also sells a fitness trainer feature—an AI chatbot that tells you how to recover—for another $50 a year. These features aren't needed to use the ring, but they definitely control prominent real estate in the app.

The app is also frustrating in that it doesn't offer many helpful notifications. To check your sleep score or steps, you need to actively launch the app. Fitbit and other devices do this very well, and for Amazfit to drop the ball here is a bit frustrating. Many of these things can be fixed with a simple update, but it does point to this device's experimental nature.

Next, Amazfit is only making this ring in sizes 10 and 12. This means folks with smaller or bigger hands are out of luck, and the ring is a tight fit if you’re a little bigger than either of those sizes. Luckily, it slips right onto my finger without issues, but Amazfit's competitors have more sizes for more hands. Helio seems like an experiment for the company, and this limited series is the first step in a bigger rollout.

Battery life is also an issue. I didn’t get any notifications that the battery was failing, so I wore the ring for a full day without gathering activity or sleep data. The app should offer more notifications, and battery life could be much better. Competing products usually hit about five to seven days on a charge, far more than Amazfit’s four-day battery.

Finally, there’s comfort. I’ve worn an Oura ring for years and never noticed it when exercising. I noticed the Helio right away, especially when lifting weights and bouldering. The Helio is 8mm wide and 2mm thick. Although that might not seem like much, the way Amazfit designed the ring means that it is just a bit thicker and wider than a regular wedding ring, and that slight size difference is very noticeable.

I have taken this ring off while doing various activities, including the aforementioned rock climbing and biking. I don’t usually wear rings, but something about this ring design makes it feel just a little too big compared to the Oura.

None of these issues are showstoppers, but they are enough to give you pause before you pick this over a competing ring. That said, if you’re a dedicated Amazfit user, this is probably the best thing to add to your constellation of devices.

Should you buy the Helio smart ring?

Price and tech make it a contender

It’s still early days for the Helio, and right now, as of this writing, I would steer potential buyers to Amazfit’s rivals. The ring works well and supplies exactly the information you’d expect, but because of the price, size limitations, app upsell, and general wearability, I’d say it isn’t quite ready for the broader market.

That said, the ring does everything all the other devices do, and if you’re in the market for an exercise watch and ring combo, this can’t be beaten. The watch I tested with this, the $400 Amazfit T-Rex Ultra, was a great combination. Amazfit is a smaller brand and doesn’t have the backing or Silicon Valley pedigree of some of its rivals.

That said, this ring is a step up from a generic smart device you’d find on Amazon and isn’t much worse than the higher-end products we mentioned before. With a little work, the Helio could be a great fitness device, and if you’re already part of the ecosystem, it’s the way to go.

Amazfit Helio

The Amazfit Helio Ring is a classic-looking titanium ring that contains activity and heart rate sensors. It can tell you how far you walked and how you slept, all in a package that is as unobtrusive as a plain wedding band. The biggest issues are some sizing and battery problems, plus the $50-a-year subscription required to unlock advanced features.

$299 at Amazfit