There’s no device quite as synonymous with the bougie wellness crowd as the Oura ring.
Since hitting the smart tech market a few years ago, Oura’s smart ring has gained plentiful A-list fans including Prince Harry, Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Aniston, as well as a raft of NBA players and other elite athletes who rely on the fitness tracker’s ability to measure sleep quality, movement and respiratory rate.
The health gadget can supposedly even detect illness in advance through tracking body temperature making it an essential piece of kit for anyone looking to maintain optimum health or track symptoms.
But as the wearables market continues to grow, Oura has taken a leap forward and released new iterations of the ring, which now offer features like period prediction and blood oxygen monitoring, as well as workout tracking and daytime heart rate tracking.
The gen 4 Oura ring has just been released with a thinner band and improvements to its hardware and charging. Our tester found it “more of an engineering marvel – not only is it more durable, there are way more sensors, too, so it’s even more accurate.”
Below, we tested the gen 3 ring and the Oura app to find out whether this wearable is in fact a must-have health tech device, or a gimmick not quite worth its hefty price tag. Would it measure up to the Apple Watch, the Whoop or the Garmin smart devices? Read on for our tester’s verdict.
How we tested the Oura ring
When reviewing the new gen 3 ring, we were interested in seeing what sort of results it tracked, how comfortable it was to wear, and what the app offered.
We took into consideration the ring’s new features, which include daytime heart rate tracking, a period calendar via the app and improved temperature sensing, but it’s important to note that other features, including the ability to predict periods, workout heart rate tracking and blood oxygen level reading weren’t available to test at the time of review.
Oura ring generation 3
Design
Everything about the ring is sleek and sophisticated. Before you purchase the ring, the brand sends you a sizing kit with plastic rings of all sizes, which we thought was super helpful as you do need to get the right fit for the best results. When the ring is on, it looks just like a standard men’s wedding band, and you can choose from gold, silver, black or stealth (a very dark silver) finish. The ring itself comes packed in a slim white box, complete with ring, USB-C charging cable and cradle.
The ring is quite pretty, but it is much thicker than our normal rings, which took a little getting used to. We found the sensors on the inside of the ring to be virtually unnoticeable, and they didn’t affect comfort or wearability. We tested it in the shower, running, gardening and cooking, and it certainly didn’t feel uncomfortable or obstructive and did not slip off or discolour.
Tracking
The accuracy of the sleep and readiness scores are impressive – although after a night of tossing and turning, no one needs an app to tell them they had a bad sleep. The data that is collected overnight and updates shortly after waking up on the app homepage in easily digestible scores. This was nice to check each morning, and the fact that it tracked your progress over time made us feel like we were in a sleep competition with ourselves. We found this element of gamification made us more committed to wearing the ring.
The ring is designed to be worn throughout the day, and we wore ours on the index finger mostly. We found that while it fit well at night on the index finger, during the day it was sometimes a bit too snug, so we swapped it to the ring finger.
Insights
The insights are effectively what you’re paying for. Oura recommends wearing the ring for two weeks to establish baseline data that can then be used to monitor changes. The insights will tell you how well you slept and readiness for the day, and track activity to determine if you’re staying active enough. The results certainly correlated with our personal energy levels. When readiness scores were high, we felt more alert and could concentrate more at work. When the score was low, we felt tired and unproductive.
We liked the sleep insights, which take a deep dive into everything including REM sleep (important in re-energising mind and body), deep sleep (the restorative kind that helps muscles repair, immune system refresh and brain flush out toxins) and latency (how long it took you to fall asleep). The recommended bedtime was also a bit like that best friend who’s always looking out for you – and it did give us an extra push to put our phone down and go to sleep.
Another feature is the period tracker and predictor. At the time of reviewing, you could manually add the dates of your last period in the app, and then tap the button to indicate when your next period starts. Once the ring gets two months of data, it will be able to predict your next cycle using the calendar method, however, in the future, it will use body temperature changes to make predictions. And for those tracking fertility, this may also be a game changer as the temperature sensors can track your basal body temperature changes as small as 0.1C, indicating when you’re ovulating.
App
The Oura app is available for Apple and Android. The daytime heart rate was fun to check at certain points throughout the day – such as during a stressful meeting or after a gym class. Why do we need this? Oura claims taking time to relax during the day can help you recover from physical and mental strain, and improve your ability to learn and retain information. But in practice, unless you’re an athlete, or need to know your heart rate for work purposes, this feels like a bit of a gimmick.
The social share feature also seemed a bit redundant, as even in the world of social oversharing, it’s unlikely we would feel the need to share our sleep score on the gram. There will be a new section in the app available later in the year with mediation, sleep videos and breathwork sessions – we think this could be great and make the membership fee more attractive, as the best stand-alone mediation apps like Headspace can be expensive. Hopefully, these elements also provide more education about how to improve your sleep and activity, as we definitely feel the whole point behind the ring is not the data itself, but what we do with that data.
Connectivity and battery life
The ring lasted about six days of constant wear before it needed to be charged. Charging only took about two hours, and it slid easily onto the small charging dock. Plus, we could wear it comfortably in the shower, going for a run, typing and cooking. It connected quickly to Bluetooth, but, at the time of reviewing, the latest version of the app was not compatible with our older model Android phone.
Price
The gen 3 ring, comes with a new membership fee of around £4 per month on top of that to access all of your data in the app. Existing Oura rings users who upgraded by 29 November 2022 received a free lifetime subscription, and any new users will get a six-month free trial before they need to start paying. Basic users who don’t subscribe will only see three activity trackers – readiness, sleep and activity. Without being able to see all the new features in the app at the time of testing (as explained above), it’s hard to know if this is good value, but it will probably put off some potential users.
Buy now £249.00, Amazon.co.uk
The verdict: Oura ring
If you’re looking for a sleep tracker or activity tracker or just want to know as much as you can about your body, then the gen 3 Oura ring will tick a lot of your boxes, in one tiny package. With four different coloured rings, it’s arguably more stylish than a Fitbit or Garmin. And with most phones overflowing with apps, anything that helps consolidate that gets a big tick.
However, if you are wondering, “Why would I need to know all this information?” then you won’t get much value out of it. After all, the wearable can only give you insights, it’s up to you to act on the suggested health improvements such as going to bed earlier, or increasing activity levels. It won’t make you healthier, only more health conscious.
In the future, we’d love to see even more insights related to sleep such as snore tracking, teeth grinding, sleep talking or walking, and ambient temperature so you know if the room is too hot or cold. And for many customers, the requirement to pay an ongoing subscription after forking out a couple hundred pounds on the hardware presents a tough decision.
However, if you’re keen to enter the world of biohacking and take steps to optimise your sleep and energy and track your readiness for exercise and your cycle more effectively, the Oura presents one of the easiest ways to do all this. It’s also a great option for anyone who doesn’t love wearing a tracker on their wrist and prefers a smaller wearable that takes up less real estate on the body.
Our fitness and wellbeing editor cites the Oura ring as her favourite wearable because of its size, but also because you can close the app and put your phone on airplane mode and the ring will still gather data and communicate with the app. This sets the Oura apart from trackers like the Whoop, which require the app to be open and running at all times with Bluetooth and wifi enabled on your phone.
Those concerned with style may also favour a ring over a band-style tracker and the Oura’s aesthetic credentials are second to none with a range of colours and styles available from the gen 3 iteration.
Read more: Take a look at the competition with our round-up of the best smart rings
