Smartwatches have long been the go-to wearable accessory to pair with your phone if you want health and fitness insights, but the latest alternative to surge in popularity is smart rings. These subtle devices look like jewellery but have similar sensors to smartwatches, which when worn collect heart rate, temperature and more.

The company leading the smart ring charge is Oura, whose Oura Ring 4 is currently the most impressive smart ring on the market with good design and a polished app to show you all your health data. But Oura’s big downside is its £5.99 per month subscription, which is necessary on top of the cost of the ring, which starts at £349.

If you’re looking for a smart ring with no subscription, there is a brand new one that has just been announced by Oura’s closest rival, Ultrahuman. The firm has unveiled the Ultrahuman Ring Pro, the follow up to the Ultrahuman Ring Air that debuted in 2023 and I reviewed recently.

The Ring Pro, which costs £419 and works with iPhone and Android, does not require a subscription for you to use its core features, which could prove crucial in tempting buyers away from Oura. It also alleges 15 days of battery life, which if accurate would trounce the Oura Ring 4’s five to eight day longevity.

The Ring Pro has a similar design to the Ring Air and the Oura Ring 4, for that matter. It is available in Bionic Gold, Space Silver, Aster Black and Raw Titanium colours, and Ultrahuman says all versions have a titanium unibody “engineered for long-term durability”.

Upgrades include “redesigned heart-rate sensing architecture” that Ultrahiman says improves the quality of results during sleep and recovery from exercise, which should lead to more accurate data. The ring itself has a newer dual-core processor that is said to process data faster and improve accuracy.

And more grimly but importantly for safety, the ring can be cut apart easier than older models should it become stuck “in the event of swelling or injury to the finger”. It’s good to see Ultrahuman think about these things.

It also wouldn’t be a product launch in 2026 with a bit of AI. Ultrahuman is introducing Jade, its “real-time biointelligence AI available now as a platform upgrade to all Ultrahuman users globally”. It promises “real-time actionable insights” and “In the future it will be able to do much more like ordering food, changing your room temperature and proactively flagging health issues before they occur” – we’ll see.

Despite the absence of a subscription, Ultrahuman continues to offer PowerPlugs, which are optional feature add-ons that each require a monthly subscription, which can get expensive quickly. Such paywalled perks include respiratory health (£2.99), Afib detection (£4.90) and cardio adaptability (£2.90), though there are several free PowerPlugs that let you track things such as Vitamin D, screentime, and cycle and ovulation tracking.

Ultrahuman says the Ring Pro can manage up to 15 days of battery life, which would be a marked improvement from the Ring Air, which I found often needed recharging after about four days. That meant I sometimes didn’t realise the ring was out of battery on my finger – and if the ring has no juice, you’ll lose hours of data.

To further combat this, there is also a new Pro charging case, which Ultrahuman says adds up to 45 days of additional battery life when it is itself fully charged. This is an upgrade from the puck charger that came with the Ring Air and always needed to be plugged into USB to charge the ring. With the new case, it is more like a wireless earbuds case which itself can be charged up for use on the go.

Not only that but the case has a ‘find my case’ feature with speaker to bleep its whereabouts at you, and even has a vibration motor for haptics connected to alerts from the Ultrahuman app. You can also charge the case wirelessly.

The Ring Pro can store up to 240 days of data and the case can apparently store a whole year’s worth. This is in case you don’t connect to the app for days or months, ensuring if you can’t for some reason, you’ll still have all that health data ready to be uploaded to your profile.