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The Next Evolution in Connected Bling

Rarely do we sit down for a meal these days that isn’t interrupted by the flickering of phones, as meal-goers look down to check various notifications and status updates. Sure, there’s the phone stack or this handkerchief, but those solutions don’t address the root of the problem: that constant interruption of phone notifications.

Founded on the principle of putting your phone away and your mind at ease, Ringly has become a familiar name in the wearable tech game, and allows users to prioritize notifications through a set of discreet alerts. (We covered their first product in this column back in 2014.) Through assigned colors and vibration frequencies, Ringly’s collection of rings set with semi-precious stones would subtly alert the wearer so that they can, let’s say, excuse themselves from the room and return an important call.

The smart-ring maker has come a long way since then. Led by founder and CEO Christina Mercando d'Avignon, the company recently announced the launch of their Aries Collection, a series of four smart bracelets. The new collection integrates upgrades of the original Ringly technology and is embedded in an 18 karat gold-plated bangle. “We learned a lot in the past year and decided to start from the beginning to really make the technology more powerful,” Mercando d'Avignon says. “And, of course, we are always trying to get things smaller.”

The Aries Collection marks the startup’s first foray into bracelets and a step away from their namesake of rings. “I know our name is Ringly, but it has always been my vision to go beyond rings,” says the founder. “We started with rings because it was the hardest form factor to do. I knew once we got the technology small enough to fit into a ring, we’d be able to extend that to a lot of different designs and a lot of different styles. Bracelets were just the next step for us.”

Through new updates in technology, the Ringly team was able to reduce the size of certain elements to introduce a bigger, more powerful chip, netting out even on the size but dramatically increasing the amount of storage — and therefore features — that can be handled by the device at any given moment. The introduction of the new chip allows the device to work with more applications, meaning smarter filtering.

“One of the things we found out that women love about Ringly is that you can really filter down to the things that mean the most to you,” Mercando d'Avignon says. “So we wanted to give women more options to be able to select the app or the people or the emails that are most important to them and be able to filter down to those.” Ringly now works with over 100 different applications across iOS and Android. Applications that users already have installed will show up in their Ringly interface, offering the option for them to set alerts or ignore altogether. “For example, if you want to know whenever your Uber or Lyft car is arriving, you can turn those on,” Mercando d'Avignon says. “Or, if you want to know when someone sends you a Snapchat, you can turn that on, too.”

With more power and space, the chip can store more of the settings on the ring itself, as opposed to sending communications back and forth from a phone to the device — helping with another tricky issue. “One of the things that we found with the ring collections was that you had to have the app running in the background,” Mercando d'Avignon says. “Even though it doesn’t kill battery life, people still think it does, so they’d go in and kill all their apps and then their ring wouldn’t work. Now you’re able to use Ringly whether the app is open or not.” The new chip can also handle step-tracking, one of the most requested features from their users.

Inside the bracelet is a battery, motor, LED light, accelerometer, antenna and circuit board. “We call it our ‘circuit board burrito’ because it’s using a flexible circuit board,” Mercando d'Avignon says. “We lay it flat, then put the motor and the battery in the middle, then you fold it up like a burrito.” With a range of 20 to 30 feet, the antenna can reach a phone from a short distance away.

With the goal of designing a wearable piece of technology that doesn’t look like technology at all, the Ringly team was faced with the additional challenge of creating a hardware interface devoid of buttons, switches, screws or screens. “And if you don’t have those things, how does it function like an electronic product?” Mercando d'Avignon says. “So, how do you turn it on or off?” One of the team’s solutions was an accelerometer, which puts the device into a low-power mode, eventually turning off, if it’s set down on a surface and stationary for a period of time. “Then when you pick it up, it turns back on,” she says.

And then how do you reset it? Anyone who has an iPhone knows the classic hold-down-the-home-button-with-the-top-button trick, but for a piece of technology with no buttons? “We added a temperature sensor so that if something does go really wrong, like if the firmware breaks, you can just put it in the freezer, and it will reset,” Mercando d'Avignon says. “Of course, we don’t expect anyone to need to use that.”

For the bracelets, Mercando d'Avignon wanted to keep the Ringly look and aesthetic — translating that to a different item of jewelry. “We are using all semi precious gemstones and 18 karat gold plating, so the collection really looks like jewelry,” she says. “The idea is to have the technology embedded into the design so that it disappears.” It still includes the familiar settings—four different vibrations and five different colors to assign to various notifications—as its ring-predecessor. “It’s really up to the user on how they set up their device,” Mercando d'Avignon says. “But what we found out is that a lot of people use it to filter out the noise, so they’ll stay connected to only the things that are important to them and that varies between user to user.”

While the Aries Collection is now available for pre-order (The first 1,000 bracelet pre-orders will receive a real diamond on the side — ooh, la la!), Mercando d'Avignon and her team are already hard at work on new designs. “We are prototyping and working on new designs, and new form factors and new collections, as well,” Mercando d'Avignon says. “We believe that women like wearing lots of different styles and don’t want to wear the same things everyday. We should have options. That’s what we’re excited about.” The bracelets preorder at an early bird rate for $195, but expect to retail around $279.