Oura Gen 3 review: Can the smart ring worn by celebrities and athletes work for you?

SSmartwatches are all the rage, and the Oura has graced the fingers of celebrities and elite athletes. It promises the health-tracking features of a smartwatch in a much smaller, less tech-heavy device, focused on sleep, recovery and resilience. But can it live up to the expectations of ordinary people, too?

Now, several years into its third iteration, the Oura Gen 3 is the most popular smart ring on the market, available in a range of attractive colours, metals and sizes. It looks and feels like an attractive piece of jewellery, and is priced accordingly: it costs £299 (€329/$299) and requires a £6-a-month subscription. Keeping up with celebrity trends has never been cheap.

The smooth, lightweight titanium ring comes in several colors and finishes and in two different shapes: one with a plateau at the top and a more expensive, completely round version, like the one we tested. A clear plastic inner layer lets you see the impressive array of components, sensors, and contacts, including three bumps that make contact with the underside of your finger to read heart rate and other metrics.

What is it like to wear it?

The Oura is very different from most other fitness trackers. It has no screen, no noise, no vibration, and no visible thing beyond the occasional red or green glow from the sensors. You can’t pay for anything with it or receive notifications. All interactions are done through the app on your phone.

Oura wants you to wear the ring on your index finger for the best data, but in that case it hits everything you’re holding and is especially annoying when using a smartphone. Switching to a smaller size on the fourth finger of my non-dominant hand was much easier to accept.

Still, the Oura is about twice as thick as a traditional wedding band, which means it digs into adjacent fingers more than other rings I’ve worn and requires some breaking in. The company offers a kit with dummy rings in all eight different sizes available, which you should wear for at least a week to really test the fit, as the rings can’t be resized.

Choosing the right size is really important, as it needs to fit snugly to collect your biometric data, but you also have to take it off frequently. It may be water-resistant to 100 meters deep, but the sensors need cleaning and drying, and I had to take it off every time I tried to grab or lift something. The battery lasts about five days before you have to take it off for an hour to charge it with a small USB-C puck. On a typical day, I must have taken it off at least three times.

Sleep, sleep and sleep more

Oura’s core proposition is a comprehensive, effortless analysis of your sleep and daily recovery to provide suggestions for meaningful improvement of your long-term health.

During the day, the ring records your activities like any other Fitbit analog, including your steps and calories, your heart rate every five minutes, your stress levels, and other factors, and incorporates them into an activity score. The ring automatically recognizes activities like walking or cycling, but it will only record heart rate during a workout if you manually activate it in the app before going for a run and the recorded distance isn’t up to par. I found better results by syncing runs recorded through Strava.

At night, the ring tracks sleep efficiency, cycles, heart rate, heart rate variability, and blood oxygen saturation, calculating an overall sleep score out of 100. It’s on par with the best smartwatches, though it’s a bit more accurate than most.

Oura’s strength lies in its trend analysis and processing of data to derive insightful insights. For example, Oura’s “readiness” score combines various biometric data, such as body temperature and sleep data, to determine how well you’ve recovered from an activity or illness and how ready you are for another workout or a stressful day.

The “resilience” score goes a step further and measures your body’s ability to withstand and recover from physiological stress, calculated from your recovery and stress over the past 14 days. If you are sick or working late into the night for extended periods, your resilience decreases.

I found that my preparedness and resilience scores matched very well with how I was feeling at the time, particularly when I was battling the disease.

The longer you wear the ring, the more information it gives you. After three months, it turned out that my chronotype is that of an early-to-bed person, i.e. a person who is flexible about bedtime but doesn’t like to get up early, which describes me perfectly.

Other interesting long-term metrics that Oura has recently added include VO₂ maximum, a common metric of cardiovascular fitness and cardiovascular age that is calculated from the stiffness of the arteries inferred from the speed at which pulses travel through the blood vessels.

No other tracker presents your health data in such an easy-to-understand and interesting way, whether on a daily basis or over the long term with trend charts. Weekly and monthly reports give you insight into how you’re doing and suggestions for improvement. The “Explore” section explains the various factors that affect your health and offers tips on how to improve, as well as various guided meditations and breathing exercises.

The app also offers “experiments” that challenge you to cut back on something unhealthy, like alcohol or caffeine, in the six hours before your bedtime. At the end of the two-week trial, it generates a report comparing your sleep efficiency and level of rest to see if there was any improvement.

The ring also offers extensive female health tracking, including menstrual cycles and pregnancy information, through a combination of biometric data such as temperature and sleep patterns. Oura also partners with several third-party apps, including Natural Cycles, for app-based birth control.

Sustainability

The Oura Gen 3 is not repairable and the battery cannot be replaced. The company does not provide an estimated battery life, but it should maintain at least 80% of its original capacity after 500 full charge cycles. It does not include any recycled materials and Oura does not publish environmental impact reports or offer exchange or recycling programs.

Price

The Oura Gen 3 starts at £299 (€329/$299) and comes in two designs and a range of finishes. The ring comes with a free month’s subscription. membership subscriptionwhich costs £5.99 (€5.99/$5.99) per month (£69.99/€69.99/$69.99 per year) and is essential.

For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Ring costs £399, the Ultrahuman Ring Air costs £329 and an Apple Watch starts at £219.

Verdict

The Oura Ring 3 is an impressive alternative to a smartwatch for those who want to monitor their sleep and overall health, but don’t want to wear a display on their wrist.

It’s an attractive piece of jewelry that doesn’t look like a piece of technology. It contains some of the most comprehensive sleep, recovery and health data available, with long-term analysis that goes beyond that of other devices and is better explained, guiding you to make meaningful improvements.

But this comes with some compromises. Not only is the ring quite expensive, it also requires a £6-a-month subscription. Technically, it works without paying monthly, but only with limited daily data, which defeats its purpose.

The bulk of the ring, especially on the sides between your fingers, can also be an issue for everyday comfort. And the ring simply does less than smartwatches that cost about the same and track as much or more, particularly during exercise, which is one of the Oura’s main weaknesses.

But the biggest problem with the ring is that it cannot be repaired and the battery cannot be replaced, which ultimately makes it disposable and makes it lose a star.

Advantages: Jewelry-like designs, comprehensive sleep and health tracking, excellent trend analysis and useful tips, easy to understand, five-day battery life, 100-meter water resistance, effective health alternative to a smartwatch.

Cons: Expensive monthly subscription, chunky for a ring and can get in the way, fitness tracking like running is weak, doesn’t do or track as much as a similarly priced smartwatch