I tried this cheaper Oura Ring competitor for women – here’s my buying advice
Key points of ZDNET
- With a price of 269 USD, Evie Ring is an affordable smart ring that caters to women’s health.
- Symptom and mood recording features are great for those who want a comprehensive daily health check-up to coincide with their menstrual cycle.
- As a first-generation product, Evie Ring cannot use the health data it aggregates to provide useful recommendations and actionable insights.
Movano’s Evie Ring drum sounds Lots of hype at CES 2023 as the smart ring space looks sparse but promising. The ring, the first product designed for women, has earned a spot on tech publications’ best products lists and is a hot tech product to watch.
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But now the initial hype is over and smart ring market has swelled, how well does the ring fare on women’s fingers compared to its growing list of competitors? I wore the Evie ring to find out.
At $269, the Evie Ring is cheaper than the starting price of its competitors. Pillars of the industry Oura retails its Heritage ring, the brand’s cheapest ring, at $299 (which, along with the $6 monthly subscription members pay, technically increases the annual price to $72). The Superman air ringan Oura competitor with a more youthful and technological style, retailing for $349. RingConnanother competitor, priced similarly to Evie but $10 more at $279.
The Evie Ring’s relatively low price could attract new customers, especially women new to the industry who want to look into smart health rings but on a smaller budget.
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There are a few features that shine. Chief among them is the tab that records Evie’s symptoms and moods. Symptom logging is competitive and thoughtful, and helps you understand the ups and downs in your mood throughout your menstrual cycle. Every day, you can record your energy level and mood level, tag certain adjectives like ‘calm’, ‘depressed’, ‘anxious’ etc., record your menstrual flow your period and symptoms, and add tags like if you drink alcohol, are sick, or are working because of an injury.
When you record these results monthly, you’ll gain insight into your mood throughout your cycle and begin to understand your physical and mental health patterns.
I enjoy filling in these results and like the comprehensive nature of the daily log. All the questions you want to ask yourself and the 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 fatigue related to alcohol, your nervous behavior or your nine hours of sleep and high energy. The symptom logging tab is the crown jewel of Evie Ring’s features.
You can also set goals using the app, such as reaching a certain number of active minutes per day or hours of sleep per night. As I set goals and recorded my daily moods and symptoms, I began to understand that this ring is for women who are interested in self-improvement and want to use a smart ring and app. accessible app to do that. The app’s user interface is certainly aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand.
Also: These Oura Ring updates are all related to women’s health
The Evie Ring is the most stylish smart ring on the market. When wearing it out, many friends were surprised that it was a smart ring. Unlike other smart rings that look like a simple wedding band, the Evie Ring has a funkier shape that balances style and function. The ring looks like an accessory you might find at a Boho boutique.
However, what you gain in a more affordable, stylish ring, you lose in useful features and convenient specifications that provide a comprehensive understanding of your health.
In my experience, the Evie Ring comes with a white charging case, which charges the ring instantly. In less than an hour, my ring’s depleted battery life increased to 64%. Not bad. But this ability also brings me to the ring’s first downside: battery life. The Evie’s battery life is about four days, while its competitors can last five to seven days. On top of that, when the Evie Ring runs low on battery, some of its features become inaccessible, including logging workouts or checking SPO2.
The lower battery life made it difficult for me to record data continuously for a day or two. I forgot to charge the ring every other day and wore it to death, so some of my daily health data was lost in these gaps. If you’re someone who uses a tech charger on a daily basis, you probably won’t experience the same problems I did.
While Evie finalizes the ring and app design, I’d like to see more energy put into building health data tools and features that help users better understand their health.
Each smart ring can measure your activity levels and sleep patterns, while also measuring your heart rate and variability. But those capabilities mean nothing if the data is not presented in a way that the average user can easily understand.
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One day, when I was sick, I wore the Evie and Oura ring. Oura Ring took my sleep and heart rate data along with other biometric data to warn me that I should stay calm. Of course, I still have to make a card to tell the ring that I’m sick, but it helps me make sense of these data metrics and make informed choices about my health and fitness.
On the Evie app, you don’t see these types of suggestions. You’ll see detailed information about your heart rate and why it’s important. But if you really want to understand your health data, you have to do your research to find out what a higher resting heart rate means, whether you should rest and sleep slowly after a sleepless night, or Are you getting proper deep sleep?
In the ring’s next update, I’d like to see a sleep and readiness score feature or any feature that aggregates the health data the ring collects and offers recommendations or summaries. off about your daily health. This addition will make data, like sleep cycle graphs and activity metrics, easier to understand and useful, providing a clearer picture of users’ overall health.
While the Evie Ring remains the only smart ring I know of that’s designed specifically for women, other smart ring brands include features that cater to women’s health and track biometric data. learn to understand their menstrual cycle and monthly behavior. For example, the recent Oura ring announced three new features it will launch later this month to provide more detailed information about your menstrual cycle, such as a cycle awareness readiness score as well as updated insights and reports.
ZDNET Buying Tips
If you want a stylish smart ring with accurate health tracking, useful mood and symptom logging features, and entry-level smart ring technology, I think Movano Evie Ring is a great place to start. It’s newer and much cheaper than its competitors, with some issues to iron out. If you want to dip your toes into the smart ring space and look stylish, then the Evie Ring could be the right choice for you.
On the other hand, while women may pay less for the Evie Ring than for other smart rings, I recommend spending a little more on another smart ring, whether it’s the Ultrahuman Ring Air or Oura Ring, for longer battery life, comprehensive health insights, sleep and recovery scores, and data that gives you a clear picture of your everyday health . In this case, an extra $100 goes a long way toward features, battery life, and general wearability.