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The sleek Oura smart ring worn by celebrities and athletes alike has been slimmed down for its fourth iteration, making it easier to put on, more comfortable to wear, and last longer between charges.
The Ring 4 swaps out its predecessor’s clear plastic interior for shiny titanium to make it look even less like a piece of cutting-edge technology on your finger. It still weighs next to nothing (3.3g to 5.2g depending on size) and comes in an expanded selection of 12 sizes and six finishes, including black, silver, gold and rose gold.
But this level of sophistication doesn’t come cheap: it costs £349 (€399/$349/A$569) and requires a monthly subscription of £5.99 (€5.99/$5.99/A$9.99) to access everything but the basic daily metrics.
Inside the new ring, the three small sensor domes under the finger on the Gen 3 have been removed, leaving two imperceptible protrusions and a series of dark windows flush with the surface. That makes it more comfortable to use and much easier to put on and take off over the knuckles.
At 3mm thick, the ring is still about twice as deep as a standard wedding band. But Oura says its improvements mean that many of its users can reduce its size compared to the Gen 3, which will help reduce its impact on adjacent fingers.
Improved sensors allow Oura to better adjust to the shape, skin tone, and orientation of your finger as the ring rotates around you, increasing tracking accuracy and reducing gaps where it couldn’t. correctly detect pulse or other metric.
Some of the sensors can also be turned off when not needed, helping to extend battery life to just under six days between charges for the size eight Ring 4, which is about a day longer than the Gen 3 equivalent. .
Oura’s unique selling point remains its comprehensive, easy-to-use sleep tracking as a cornerstone of overall health, but it has slowly added more and more features to track health trends throughout the day for a more holistic view.
In addition to basic steps and caloric activity tracking, the rings can monitor cardiovascular health and automatically track 40 different workouts with heart rate zones. Oura’s comprehensive women’s health, fertility and pregnancy tracking has been expanded, and the ring can be used with Natural Cycles’ birth control service.
Its exercise tracking is still basic compared to a smartwatch or running watch, but Oura can import workouts from third-party services like Strava, helping you get a better picture of your overall health.
Best app now with an AI assistant
Oura has revamped its app to help manage the multiple metrics your rings now collect. The Today tab is dynamic and shows what’s happening now, which is usually your activity, stress, heart rate, and a timeline of the various events of your day, such as when you woke up, when you ate, exercised, and other things you did. can label. by hand. A row of readiness, sleep, activity, heart rate, and stress scores provides one-touch access at the top of the page.
The Vitals tab shows all the metrics the ring tracks, which are compiled into overall readiness and sleep scores, your activity goal, daytime heart rate, and stress. Many of the scores have reference bars, so you can quickly see if things are currently within your normal range. Or you can zoom in on each to see the various metrics that contribute to the score, including graphs and charts for the past few days, weeks, or months.
The last tab is My Health, which shows long-term trends such as your resistance to stress and illness, your age and cardiovascular fitness, your sleep chronotype, and various weekly and monthly reports.
The app also has a couple of AI features, including a food logging system that recognizes what you’ve eaten using your phone’s camera and puts it on your timeline. It works surprisingly well, even for random home-cooked meals, but it’s designed to track eating regularity rather than counting calories.
It also has a new AI chatbot “Oura Advisor”, which analyzes your health data and tries to guide you towards a goal, giving you some mentoring or support. It can monitor you throughout the day via a notification on your phone to ask how you’re feeling, and in my two weeks of testing it was smart enough to understand that the reason my daily activity had decreased was due to recovery from an injury. .
Whether it proves useful in the long term remains to be seen, but for those who need guidance on how to improve a particular aspect of their health, it can at least offer advice and motivation.
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Overall, the Oura app does a much better job of making its myriad metrics easy to interpret on both a macro and micro scale. It’s also full of nice touches, like changing the color of the graph to correspond to your stress level and providing haptic pulses on the phone in time with your recorded heart rate.
Sustainability
The Oura Ring 4 cannot be repaired and the battery cannot be replaced. The company does not provide an expected lifespan for the battery, 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 Ring 4 starts at £349 (€399/$349/A$569) with a range of colors and finishes. The ring comes with one month free. membership subscriptionwhich costs £5.99 (€5.99/$5.99/A$9.99) per month or £69.99/€69.99/$69.99/A$109.99 per year and is essential.
For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Ring costs £399, the Ultrahuman Ring Air costs £329 and an Apple Watch costs from £219.
Verdict
The Oura Ring 4 is a significant improvement in fit and comfort over its predecessors, and it doesn’t even remotely look like a piece of technology on your finger.
Removing the sensor bumps on the inside of the ring has made it much easier to live with, especially if you can wear a slightly smaller size, because it’s still quite thick compared to a regular wedding band or similar.
Improvements in accuracy and battery life are welcome. Oura’s best-in-class sleep and overall health tracking, as well as its good app and reliable syncing, keep it ahead of increasingly fierce competition. If you want accurate health tracking without using technology on your wrist, Oura is the answer.
But the best smart ring on the market isn’t cheap and costs as much or more than a more capable smartwatch. And it requires a £6 a month subscription on top of anything other than basic data.
Like previous Ouras, the ring’s biggest problem is that it can’t be repaired and the battery can’t be replaced, ultimately making it disposable and losing its star.
Advantages: Looks like jewelry, not technology, Complete sleep and health tracking, Excellent trend analysis and helpful tips, Easy to understand, Six-day battery life, 100-meter water resistance, Effective health alternative to a smartwatch .
Cons: Expensive monthly subscription, thick for a ring, run and exercise tracking is weak, doesn’t do or track as much as a similarly priced smartwatch, can’t be repaired.