Oura Ring 4 Review: Still on top — for now (for the magnification of my hangry cat, P, D, C, D)

The charging dock has been updated. It’s larger, metal, and looks sleeker than previous docks. Unfortunately, my hangry cat had no problems knocking it off my nightstand. I would have liked Oura to have opted for a more convenient charging case. Maybe next time.

Source: Oura Ring 4 review: still on top — for now

The Fourth Oura Ring: Where Are We Now? What Have We Learned and How Have We Solved It? How Does Oura Flex?

Oura has been the top dog in smart rings for the past decade. This year there has been a renaissance of smart ring, but its competitors are mostly getting into the game or launching a second version. This is the third Oura Ring. Oura has been conducting its own studies for a long time. The most readily available product at third-party retail stores in the US is it, and it can be found on the fingers of A-list celebrities. In response to increased competition, Oura has launched half a dozen new features in the past 12 months. And now, Oura is closing out 2024 with several hardware and software refinements.

The first thing we should do is look at software. The app has had a new look. Oura released several new features and metrics in the past year, turning the dashboard into a cluttered mess. Now everything’s been streamlined into three tabs: Vitals, and My Health today.

Some of the engineering sweat and tears were appreciated by my brain. Oura is flexing in a technological way. Practically speaking, it means close to diddly squat for the average person. Ninety nine percent of the time, wearing the Oura Ring 4 felt the same as the other three Gen 3 and 2. The only time I noticed a difference was when I felt bloated. When attempting to take the ring off, the sensor bumps on the older Oura Rings could be painful. It was a relief to not have that problem this time around.

Automatic activity detection has now been expanded to 40 activities. (Oura lists roughly 30 of them here.) This makes the ring a much better standalone activity tracker, especially since enabling location permissions will also generate automatic GPS route maps. It’s flexible for smartwatch users, too. I typically don’t track walks on my smartwatch, but Oura picked them up easily. Start and end times, as well as the route maps, were also accurate. Conversely, I much prefer to record my runs and strength sessions with a smartwatch. For those instances, Oura prioritizes manually tracked or imported activities so I didn’t have to worry about duplicate activity records.

Oura states that a study shows that the new Smart Sensing algorithm supports a significant jump in accuracy for signal quality, blood oxygen, and breathing disturbance detection. Users should not see a lot of heart rate data gaps during the day and night.

This will be Oura’s greatest obstacle. It’s got a substantial lead in this space, but its rivals have made a point of eschewing subscriptions. Samsung, in particular, has large coffers and interesting ideas about how smart rings should interact with other gadgets like phones and smartwatches. When used with aGalaxy watch, the Ring has gesture controls that allow you to use your phone’s camera to take selfies and get a longer battery life. If Apple comes out with a smart ring, it’ll be a dark day at Oura headquarters. Meanwhile, smaller rivals like RingConn can undercut Oura’s price, even if the tracking is more basic.

Source: Oura Ring 4 review: still on top — for now

Oura Ring 4 Review: Still on Top — for Now [https://www.theverge.com/24268024/oura-ring-4-review-smart-rings-wearables

Oura is betting that the best is worth paying for. It will probably hold as long as everyone is playing catch-up. But ask anyone who races: it’s hard to maintain a lead forever.

Every smart device requires you to agree to a number of terms and conditions before you are allowed to use it. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

To use an Oura Ring, you must pair it with an iOS / Android smartphone. That includes the phone’s terms of service, privacy policy, and any other permissions you grant. You may also be asked to share permissions for location data, Bluetooth, etc.

Source: Oura Ring 4 review: still on top — for now

The Oura Ring: What have we learnt in the last 10 years? How do we use the Oura ring to help us understand what we are doing and how we can improve ours?

Another improvement is the battery life. You can now get up to seven or eight days on a single charge. Even with the power-guzzling blood oxygen sensed feature on, I have been able to get about 6.5 days. I got three to four days with a Gen 3. Your mileage can vary based on ring size. The larger the battery, the greater its size. This is a significant bump, though I did get longer with the first-gen RingConn and from the Samsung Galaxy Ring when it was paired with a smartwatch.

A number of significant hardware and software changes to the fourth generation of the ring have been made by Oura to make it more convenient and useful with the demographic changes that it has been seeing. I changed the finish from bro-y to brushed silver. It looks and feels more like jewelry than ever, and I like it.

The Oura Gen 2 and Gen 3 rings had domed interiors. The fourth-gen ring is made entirely of titanium, and the inside is flatter, with recessed sensors. This is impressive engineering for a small device, and it might not seem like it. The light from the sensor was diffused in a less precise manner by the older rings. Since the rings are naturally rotating during the day, it is easy for the sensors to drift out of alignment. Good skin contact is what the previous Oura Rings ensured to mitigate those factors.

The Oura Ring 4 gives the company a lead over the competition. When rivals are cheaper and have started innovating in new directions, the question is how long Oura can maintain it.

This year, more women than men wear the Oura ring—yes, that chunky finger nugget that is, or was, the health tracking tool for every Huberman-listening, MMA-fighting, raw-meat-eating tech bro. Of all the Oura ring wearers, 49 percent is now women, and among them, women in their twenties, who have bought rings 2.6 times the rate of other demographic groups.

The Oura ring is the only tool I have that can accurately predict my period because I am a woman. When you use a fitness tracker, you can see the drop inBBT, which means that it will be accurate when you use it to predict your period and not just when you get out of bed. In testing, Oura are the only devices that have caught it consistently.

The new ring doesn’t have any bumps. The ring includes a number of sensors that can measure blood oxygen, heart rate, sleep rates, and even temperature. It also comes in a much bigger size range, with sizes from 4 to 15, although I again sized into my ring size 8.