Oura Ring 4 review: best smart ring gets comfort and battery upgrade | Wearable technology

Oura’s stylish smart ring worn by celebrities and celebrities like athletes The fourth iteration is slimmer, easier to wear, more comfortable to wear, and lasts longer after charging.

The Ring 4 swaps its predecessor’s clear plastic interior for shiny titanium, making it look less like a cutting-edge piece of tech on your finger. It weighs next to nothing (ranging from 3.3 grams to 5.2 grams depending on size) and is available in 12 sizes and six finishes, including black, silver, gold and rose gold.

But this level of sophistication doesn’t come cheap, with prices starting at £349 (€399/$349/AU$569), with a monthly subscription costing £5.99 (€5.99/$5.99/AU$9.99) to access all but the basic daily indicators. anything outside.

On the inside of your new ring, three small sensor domes under your finger in the third generation have been removed, leaving two imperceptible protrusions and a series of darkened windows flush with the surface. This makes it more comfortable to wear and easier to put on and off with your knuckles.

The ring is 3mm thick, approximately twice the depth of a standard wedding band. But Oura says its improvements mean many users can get a smaller size than Gen 3, which will help reduce the impact on adjacent fingers.

The upgraded sensor allows Oura to better adapt to the shape, skin tone, and orientation of your finger as the ring rotates around it, improving tracking accuracy and reducing gaps where it doesn’t properly detect your pulse or other metrics.

Some of the sensors can also be turned off when not needed, which helps extend the Ring 4’s battery life to just under six days, about a day longer than the equivalent Gen 3.

Oura’s unique selling point remains its comprehensive and effortless sleep tracking as a cornerstone of overall health, but it has slowly added more and more features to track daytime health trends for a more comprehensive view.

In addition to basic step and calorie activity tracking, the ring can monitor cardiovascular health and automatically track 40 different heart rate zone exercises. Oura’s comprehensive women’s health, fertility and pregnancy tracking capabilities have been expanded, and the ring can be used with Natural Cycles Birth Control Services.

Its exercise tracking is still basic compared to running or smartwatches, but the Oura can import workout data from third-party services like Strava, which helps it better understand your overall health.

Now with AI assistants, better apps

Oura overhauled its application to help manage the multiple metrics its rings now collect. The Today tab is dynamic and shows what’s happening right now, typically your activity, stress, heart rate, and a timeline of various events throughout the day, such as when you woke up, when you ate, exercised, and what you can mark Other content manually. A row of scores for readiness, sleep, activity, heart rate and stress are available at the top of the page, accessible with one click.

The Vital Signs tab displays all the metrics tracked by the ring, collected under overall scores for readiness and sleep, activity goals, daytime heart rate, and stress. Many scores have base lines so you can quickly see if your current situation is within normal limits. Alternatively, you can expand each metric to see a variety of metrics that contribute to your score, including charts over the past days, weeks, or months.

The final tab is My Health, which shows long-term trends such as your resilience to stress and illness, cardiovascular age and ability, your type of sleep schedule, and various weekly and monthly reports.

The app also has some artificial intelligence features, including a meal-logging system that uses your phone’s camera to identify what you’ve eaten and put it into your timeline. It works surprisingly well even with random home-cooked meals, but it’s made for charting eating patterns rather than counting calories.

It also has a new “Oura Advisor” artificial intelligence chatbot that will look at your health data and try to guide you towards your goals, providing some guidance or support. It can check in with you during the day via notifications on your phone, asking you how you’re feeling, and during my two weeks of testing, it was smart enough to understand that my reduction in daily activity was due to recovery from an injury.

Whether it will be useful in the long term remains to be seen, but it could at least provide tips and motivation for those who need guidance on how to improve a particular aspect of their health.

Overall, the Oura app does a better job of making its myriad indicators easy to interpret on both a macro and micro level. It’s also filled with nifty details, like changing the color of the graph to correspond with stress levels and providing haptic pulses on the phone in time based on the recorded heart rate.

Sustainable development

Oura Ring 4 is not repairable and the battery is not replaceable. The company didn’t provide a life expectancy for the battery, but it should retain at least 80% of its original capacity after 500 full charge cycles. It does not contain any recycled materials, and Oura does not issue an environmental impact report or offer trade-in or recycling programs.

price

Oura Tamaki 4 starts at £349 (€399/$349/AU$569) available in a range of colors and finishes. Ring free for one month Member subscriptionwhich costs £5.99 (€5.99/$5.99/AU$9.99) per month, or £69.99/€69.99/$69.99/AU$109.99 per year, is essential.

For comparison, the cost of the Samsung Galaxy Ring £399superman toroidal air cost £329 The price of Apple Watch is £219.

judgment

The Oura Ring 4 offers a significant improvement in fit and comfort compared to its predecessor, and doesn’t look like a piece of tech on your fingers at all.

Removing the sensor bump on the inside of the ring makes it easier to use, especially if you can wear a slightly smaller ring since 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, along with great apps and reliable syncing, keep it ahead of the growing competition. If you want accurate health tracking without a tech device on your wrist, Oura is the answer.

But the best smart rings on the market are no cheaper than more powerful smartwatches, if not more. It requires a monthly subscription fee of £6 on top of basic data.

Like the Ouras before it, the biggest problem with this ring is that it cannot be repaired and the battery cannot be replaced, ultimately making it a disposable product. lose a star.

advantage: Looks like jewelry rather than technology, comprehensive sleep and health tracking, in-depth analysis of trends and helpful advice, easy to understand, six-day battery life, 100m water resistance, an effective alternative to health smartwatches.

shortcoming: Expensive, monthly subscription, ring is thick, run and workout tracking is weak, doesn’t do or track like smartwatches in the same price range, cannot be repaired.