With the smart ring market hotting up – it’s the turn of the Oura Ring 4 to show us what it's got.
The Oura Ring 4’s incredible insights mean it’s still one of the best wearables on the market in any form factor. It’s a triumph of proper scientific insights, thoughtful implementation and real investment that put the user in tune with their bodies. That’s what you pay the subscription for. I am disappointed that the Oura Ring 4 couldn’t reduce in size, or produce meaningfully better battery life – and coupled with its high price tag – it opens the door for Samsung for the more casual user, and RingConn 2 for data geeks. The Oura Ring 4 is still the best, but by a smaller margin than ever before.
Pros
- The best wellness tracker out there
- Smart circadian insights
- Brilliant presentation of data
Cons
- Rivals are thinner and more comfortable
- Really expensive
- Workout tracking still iffy
The Oura Ring 4 is one of our most keenly anticipated reviews of 2024 – and sets the tone for the smart ring wars for the year (or more) ahead.
When reviewing smart rings it’s important to be mindful that most of the magic is done off-device. The Oura Ring 4 has no screen, interface, or buttons. It’s a simple loop of sensors – and the app makes things count. That means two different things can be true at the same time, and that’s the case here:
- The Oura Ring 4 is a fabulous health-tracking wearable and the best smart ring out there.
- The Oura Ring 4 itself is an underwhelming update – and it’s not worth upgrading from Gen 3.
Without really upgrading the physical design, the Oura Ring 4 rises in price, adds only a few features (most of which roll back to Oura Ring Gen 3) and doesn’t meaningfully reduce the size of the ring. What’s more, it lets Samsung and (shockingly) RingConn in the back door as genuine alternatives.
But the insights and experience of Oura Ring 4 stay ahead of the competition – and it’s still one of the best wearables out there, period.
Buy the best: Best smart rings from our testing
How we tested
We have worn the Oura Ring Gen 3 for the last few years so have plenty of data within the Oura ecosystem. We’ve worn the Ring 4 for three weeks, and have run down the battery through three complete cycles. James also undertook a host of workouts, including running, functional fitness, strength training, and yoga. Stress and sleep were tested by living with two small children – and data was compared against a Whoop 4.0.
| Oura Ring Gen 4 | Oura Ring Gen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Starts at $349 | Starts at $299 |
| Dimensions | Width: 7.90 mm Thickness: 2.88 mm | Width: 7.9 mm Thickness: 2.7 – 2.9 mm |
| Weight | 3.3 – 5.2 g (sizes 4-15) | 4 – 6 g (varies with ring size) |
| Sizes | 4 to 15 | 6 to 13 |
| Finishes | Silver Black Brushed Silver Stealth Gold Rose Gold | Silver Black Stealth Gold |
| Battery Life | Up to 8 days | Up to 7 days |
| Water Resistance | Water-resistant to 100m/328ft Suitable for water sports and sauna (no diving) | Water-resistant to 100m/328ft Suitable for water sports and sauna (no diving) |
| Accuracy & Sensors | Smart Sensing technology with 18 signal pathways Infrared photoplethysmography (PPG), red/green LEDs, NTC temperature sensors, accelerometer | 8 signal pathways Infrared photoplethysmography (PPG), red/green LEDs, NTC temperature sensors, accelerometer |
Price and alternatives
The Oura Ring 4 jumps in price to $349/£349 for a standard model, which rises more depending on the finish. The gold, pictured here, costs $499/£499. With the Oura Ring Gen 3 going end-of-life, the upshot is that the smart ring just got $50 more expensive.
I’ve been listening and reading a lot of comments around Oura Ring 4 in the writing of this review – and one thing stands out: some people are very anti subscriptions – even ones as low as $5.99/£4.99 (Fitbit Premium and Apple Fitness + are both $9.99) I get it. Oura Ring 4 is already really expensive so adding over $70/£60 a year is a big ask.
I still recommend Oura, given that the quality of the insights around sleep, circadian rhythm, and readiness are *that* good. But as I have written about before, I think that Oura should offer more value for subscribers. It doesn’t sit right with me that an Oura member of three years gets just 10% off the value of a new Ring 4 if theirs is tired, old, or the battery is shot.
If the Oura is simply too expensive, or you just don’t care enough about sleep tracking, you do have good options. Our top budget pick is now RingConn 2, which is a superb smart ring, at a great price. The app is quite chaotic, but data nerds will love what they find. Ultrahuman also offers excellent circadian insights subscription-free.
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is possibly the best option and is slimmer than Oura Ring 4, but at $399/£399 it costs even more than Oura. Yes, it has no subscription – but the insights are lacking in comparison.
Design, comfort and size
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the Oura Ring 4 is that the size hasn’t changed compared to the last generation. And that feels odd. I went for the gold finish to match my wedding band. It did pick up a fair few scratches in just a couple of weights sessions. It’s a shame that smart rings simply don’t mix with the gym.
The Oura Gen 4 remains the same thickness as the Oura Ring Gen 3, and at 7.9mm wide, it has the same profile on the finger. It’s also 2.88mm thick, compared to 2.7mm of the Oura Ring Gen 3 Heritage and 2.99mm of the Gen 3 Horizon.
Weight has been reduced significantly thanks to changes to the interior material, which is now all titanium rather than resin. It’s now 3.3g, down from 4g. Again, that sounds like a small change, but I found it made a significant difference.
Smart rings are a game of small differences that feel big. But I’m surprised that Oura has not slimmed down its ring for this generation. I’m sure it could have been done, but the company seems to have opted to double down on accuracy instead.
But it means that the Samsung Galaxy Ring and RingConn 2 have stolen a march on Oura in terms of size, and are now thinner and more comfortable. The Galaxy Ring comes in at 7mm wide, and 2.6mm thick, and its smallest ring is 2.3g. The RingConn 2 is also epically small at 6.8mm wide and just 2mm thick. It starts the weigh-in at 2g for its smallest ring size, and having worn it myself, it’s ridiculously thin.
Reading the thoughts of other reviewers (who didn’t notice accuracy issues with workout detection and published their reviews before us) no one seems bothered about the size — and Ring 4 has garnered universal praise. The celebs that tout it on social media don’t seem to mind either, and Oura might even be keen on being the prominent, chunkier ring.
But I’m disappointed that the Ring 4 didn’t slim down to the same size as the Galaxy Ring, which is more comfortable to wear. But there are upsides.
The new Smart Sensing platform uses an increased number of photoreceptors to allow for the ring twisting on your finger, so gone are the uncomfortable ‘domes’ (nobbles) on the interior. The Ring 4 feels smoother on the inside, so not only is it ring lighter, it’s nicer to wear in general.
The Oura app and health features
The insights and stats served up by Oura are some of the best you’ll find on any wearable. You won’t think overt ‘health’ metrics such as blood pressure or ECG, but a strong suit of wellness features designed to coach you into getting more sleep and being in tune with your vitals.
It’s far smarter than the Apple Watch, more accurate and insightful than a Galaxy Watch – but more measured and accessible than Whoop.
The new app splits things into three screens: Today, Vitals, and My Health.
Today rounds up all the ‘live’ stuff. That’s your activity levels vs goal, stress tracking (more on that shortly), and the slightly chaotic timeline of activity. The ever-present metrics of sleep score, readiness score, activity, heart rate, and stress and shown at the top.
The readiness score shows you how well your body is recovered for the day. It’s nowhere near as violent as Whoop’s score, which can head into single figures just for having a glass of wine before bed. Oura’s feels more like gentle guidance.
The Vitals screen drill down into your main health stats, and how they compare to your baselines. This screen could tell you if you’re getting sick, if metrics such as breathing rate take a sudden spike. It puts you in tune with your body and vitals.
My Health offers insights into longitudinal metrics. That’s stuff like Stress Resilience, Cardiovascular Age, Cardio Capacity, sleep regularity, and excitingly, your chronotype. It’s great to see longitudinal tracking take more of a front seat, as this is where the real value of smart rings lie.
Circadian rhythm insights have been elevated in the new Oura app. You can see your chronotype and how your bedtimes sync with your personal cycle. Oura has added further circadian insights in the form of its new meal-tracking feature. Oura will likely incorporate a CGM eventually, but for now, it mainly assesses the regularity of your meals and how that fits with your natural circadian rhythm.
I’ve been writing a lot about circadian rhythm this year, and it’s going to be a huge area for wearables as an actionable way in which we can boost energy and longevity. So it’s great to see that here.
It can take two weeks for much of this data to appear – and it’s reassuring to see Oura take care to build baselines for proper insights.
Stress tracking still plays a big part of the Oura experience and it’s been improved on again. I’m a fan of the Resilience metric – as that’s the actionable part of stress tracking. You build stress resilience with good sleep and healthy exercise levels over a period of time.
The stress tracking itself has been improved, and you can add tags and show if movement is correlated to physical stress. The color coding is of the stress window nice, and stressful days of solo parenting a sick baby correlated within the app. It’s not often I say this about stress tracking, but the mix here feels good.
Sleep tracking and accuracy
Oura’s sleep tracking is still probably the best in the business, and a recent study has shown the Ring Gen 3 to have the greatest sensitivity for sleep staging accuracy. In my testing, I found it really reliable, and it always correlated to Whoop’s data.
Oura is one of the leaders in promoting bedtime consistency, informing users on their natural rhythm –and doing it in a way that’s not relentlessly stressful. One of the dangers of wearables is that reported bad sleep can make us feel worse. Oura does a good job of softening the blow of bad sleep.
This fantastic sleep tracking is underpinned by the new Smart Sensing platform. It ups the signal pathways from 8 to 18 — but not only that — refines the signal based on BMI, skin tone, physiology, and the position of the Ring 4.
Firstly, I can only praise Oura for doing something few other brands have done and create a solution to the issues of skin tone. If you are a Person of Color, you’ve likely had to put up with poorer device accuracy on wearables. This should be a good step forward.
From the perspective of a white male who has tested the Gen 3 and now Ring 4, there is an improvement in accuracy. I used to get a lot of gaps in my nighttime HR data – now there are none.
On a test run against a chest strap the accuracy, while not spot on, HR data was close enough that Oura could estimate my level of fitness and work rate. That wasn’t the case on the Gen 3.
Workout and activity detection
One of the big new features heading to Oura with the Ring 4 launch (and heading to Gen 3) is automatic workout detection.
I was skeptical in my briefing as Oura has always been a poor workout tracker. By Oura’s own admission, Ring 4 is a tool that holistically offers an overview of all movement, be it walking upstairs or a morning jog. It then lumps all these into a stream of “activity” and it’s not built for analyzing the performance of workouts, like an Apple Watch or Garmin.
Wareable uncovered some initial bugs with the heart rate on auto-tracked running workouts and tagging walking around my house as 1hr 30 runs. Oura has fixed a software update that delayed this review.
But that wasn’t the end of our issues. It rarely picked up my strength sessions automatically – and trolled me by tagging putting my son to bed as yoga, while subsequently not identifying any element of my actual yoga class *on the same night.* You can retrospectively add workouts, but only on the same day. The whole thing needs a bit more work.
The Smart Sense platform did improve workout HR over the Gen 3, which is good news. The Oura app isn’t designed for analyzing workouts, but overall HR was fairly accurate about my running session (topping out at 179bpm instead of 190bpm) but did the job of accurately showing my efforts within the app. That makes features such as Cardiovascular Age and Cardio Capacity more reliable.
You can also integrate with Strava, however, a bug stopped the heart rate coming over. In short, if you actually work out, get a proper device. A smart ring ain’t it.
Battery life
Oura promises ‘up to 8 days’ battery life from the Ring 4 – and ‘up to’ does a fair amount of heavy lifting. I didn’t get the Oura Ring 4 to last longer than five days through three battery cycles – with all of the health tracking turned on. Turning off blood oxygen tracking could elevate beyond six days – but Wareable doesn’t compromise *shades emoji*.
As many others have suggested, I would also have liked a charging case. Here’s a quick example why: I let my Oura die one night having not noticed it was low on battery. In the morning I wanted to charge fully, but I didn’t have time. With a charging case, I could have popped it in my bag and walked out of the door, but instead, I was without it for the whole day, with annoying gaps in my data.
