Spigen Style Ring POP review: The new gold standard in phone grips

Spigen's new phone grip solves every problem we had with the original and looks so good doing it.

It's no secret that phone grips are a smartphone accessory worth having. They help you keep ahold of your precious, pricey Android phone — and help you avoid straining the muscles and tendons in your priceless hands — so don't leave home without one!

Every phone grip on the market today seems to have a trade-off of some sort — Popsockets can't kickstand in portrait like phone rings, the Ringke Ring is bulky and has a tendency to spin when I set it down on my desk, and the original Spigen Style Ring refuses to lay flat and is a big, bulky design that doesn't look nearly as elegant as the rest of the cases and phone accessories Spigen is known for.

Well, it's taken a few years and a few hiccups, but Spigen has a new Style Ring on its hands, and not only does the Spigen Style Ring POP fix everything wrong with the original — and then some — it's also stolen my heart in just a few days.

Spigen Style Ring POP

Price: $14.99

Bottom line: This phone grip is small, thin, adaptable, and comes in five diverse colors that can add a pop of color — sorry, I couldn't help myself — and functionality to any smartphone. Buy one for everyone you know

The Good

• Compact, lay-flat phone grip
• The ring's flat edge gives the kickstand more stability
• Compatible with magnetic car/desk mounts

The Bad

• No "safe" silver/white/plain option
• The ring can be a bit hard to pull out when folded all the way down

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Not like, love

Spigen Style Ring POP What I love

Spigen's Style Ring POP follows the same basic format many of the phone rings of the last year have used: the entire base of the mount sits atop a bearing that allowing you to rotate the grip 360 degrees, and attached to that central, circular hub is a phone ring that can fold the full 180 degrees from flat around the grip's hub to flat folded away from the grip's hub.

The Style Ring POP has kept the flat edge at the base of the phone ring, which offers more stability with using the kickstand in the portrait orientation, which adds extra stability when propping the phone up next to your keyboard at work in portrait.

This grip is incredibly compact, coming in at half the thickness of the Ringke Ring while the Style Ring POP's central base is exactly the size of a quarter. Te grip's hinge sits up ever-so-slightly above the flat back of your phone or phone case.

This thin, flat back allows the Style Ring POP to sit flat without spinning or rattling around on my desktop, and also allows the grip to sit flush against a magnetic mount in the car or at your desk. That's right, Spigen has moved away from the proprietary pain-in-the-butt hook-based mounts that the original Style Ring used and is instead letting us all use more prevalent and consistent magnetic mounts, though that also means that the Spigen Phone Ring, like most metal phone rings, doesn't play nice with wireless charging.

Spigen Style Ring POP What could still improve

Spigen made the Style Ring POP a low-profile phone grip, and while that means less of a bulge on the back of the phone and less chance of anything snagging when putting it in your pocket, it can also make the ring hard to swing open one-handed. Since the grip is so thin and lacks the indentation many phone rings like the Ringke Ring have, the ring can be hard to get a fingernail under — especially for a nail-biter like me.

The only other complaint I have for the Spigen Style Ring POP was when I was trying to figure out when one to use with my phone case. The Style Ring POP comes in five colors — Red, Champagne Gold, Gunmetal (dark metallic gray), Orchid Blue (muted light blue), and Rose Gold, which should really be called what it is: millennial pink.

My everyday case is a dark navy and silver, and no color quite matched it on first thought. Orchid Blue was too far from the straight Satin Silver of the case, and Gunmetal was far too dark. I know that regular silver is a bit boring at times because it's the default color for so many phones and Chromebooks, but I'd rather have a boring that matched the phone instead of having to go big and bold with a flashy color.

Spigen Style Ring POP

As far as phone grips go, the Spigen Style Ring POP is one of the best-looking and best-performing I've ever seen. It lays flat and stable on my desktop, the kickstand is easy to adjust and use in both portrait and landscape, and by ditching the proprietary hook-based mounts to instead support our favorite — and darn near universally compatible — magnetic car mounts makes the Style Ring POP my new favorite phone grip.

5 out of 5

Bold color options like ruby Red and an Orchid Gray that looks tailor-made for the Coral Blue Samsung Galaxy S9 can add style as much as substance to the phone or phone case the grip is applied to, but I do wish there were more color options — especially in regards to a more neutral white or straight silver. Oh, well, at least the red pops against my blue/silver Spigen Neo Hybrid case and gives it a slight Captain America vibe.

See at Amazon