Somewhere in a drawer in your mum’s house, there is a small plastic egg with a dead pet inside it. You know the one. You fed it, you cleaned up after it, you took it to school against explicit instructions, and then you got distracted for 48 hours and it ascended. Bandai has decided that thirty years is long enough to sit with that guilt, and has built you a second chance – this time in ring form.
Meet the Tamagotchi Ring: a fully functioning virtual pet, with a colour screen, that you wear on your finger. It was unveiled to mark Tamagotchi’s 30 year anniversary, pre-orders opened on 27 August through Premium Bandai, and it is – by Bandai’s own reckoning – the most compact Tamagotchi ever made.
What Exactly Is The Tamagotchi Ring?
It is not just jewellery, it is a real, playable Tamagotchi that happens to be 28mm tall and 23mm wide, with a 0.56-inch colour LCD screen and control buttons down the sides. The front buttons are decorative – the working ones sit on the left and right, so you can feed your pet with a thumb while looking like you are simply adjusting your jewellery.
Tamagotchi has done small before – the Mini, the Nano, the keyring iterations that lived on school bags in 2004. None of them had colour. This one does, and it is 56% the length of the 1996 original while still keeping that egg-shaped silhouette, which is a genuinely absurd piece of engineering.
The Specs, For The Nerds Among Us
Bandai spent two years developing it, and the component count is the tell: 64 internal parts, made up of 52 electronic components and 12 plastic ones. For context, The Gadgeteer notes that is the lowest component count of any colour-LCD Tamagotchi released so far – the Tamagotchi Paradise, by comparison, runs on 116.
There is no USB port on the ring itself, because there is simply nowhere to put one. Instead it charges in a dedicated cradle. A tiny pet with its own tiny bed. We are fine.
You get more than 30 characters to raise, pulled from thirty years of franchise history – Mametchi, Kuchipatchi, Memetchi, Flowertchi, Lovelitchi and Melodytchi all make the cut – plus one secret character that only appears depending on how you care for yours. There are mini-games, and you can decorate your pet’s room, which is the sort of detail that will quietly eat an entire Sunday.
The Colourways Are, Frustratingly, Very Good
Three options, and none of them look like a toy:
- Pink x Pearl White – a pearly, iridescent aurora finish
- Light Blue x Metallic Gold – plated
- Black x Metallic Silver – plated
It comes in two Japanese ring sizes, 10 and 14, with an adapter included for sizing. Which is to say: Bandai has thought about this as jewellery, not merchandise.
Price And Release Date
The Tamagotchi Ring is ¥7,700, which lands at roughly £38 to £48 depending on the day the pound is having. Pre-orders opened on 27 August via Premium Bandai and close on 6 October, with deliveries scheduled for February 2027.
Now the bad news. It is currently a Japan-only release. International reseller pre-orders sold out effectively immediately, which tells you everything about demand and nothing reassuring about your chances.
Why We Care
The smart ring category has spent the last few years measuring us. Oura wants your sleep score. Ultrahuman wants your recovery data. Samsung wants your resting heart rate, and every one of those devices asks you to look at a number and feel something about it. The Tamagotchi Ring asks you to look after something small and silly that will beep at you at inconvenient moments. It generates no insights. It has no subscription. It will not tell you that your readiness is 61%.
There is a real product lesson buried in the whimsy: the miniaturisation here is legitimately advanced – a colour screen and 30 characters running in a 28mm shell on a component count lower than anything comparable – and Bandai has spent all of it on joy rather than optimisation.
It also lands in a market that is ready for it. Smart rings have already been reframed as jewellery – hence the entire cottage industry of ring jackets and covers designed to make your health tracker look like something you chose. Bandai has simply skipped that step and made the tech the jewellery from the start.
Whether it ever officially leaves Japan is another question. But if you want a “smart ring” that gives you joy back rather than just taking your data – this is the one… just set an alarm for the feeding schedule this time.
Some of the products and services featured in this article may be from our affiliate partners, which means we may earn a small commission if you make a purchase through these links — at no extra cost to you. Our editorial team only spotlights what we genuinely love and think you will, too.