A few months ago, we reviewed the Samsung Galaxy Ring, a formidable smart ring that entered the ring against the notable Oura Ring. Now, Oura Ring is swinging back, eager to reclaim its crown in the high-stakes smart ring arena. With the debut of the Oura Ring 4, we at Silverithm are eager to see how it has evolved to hold its own against tough opponents like the Galaxy Ring and RingConn Gen 2. Let’s take a deep dive into its design, battery longevity, features, and accompanying app.
Design
Ambitious strides in the design of the newest Oura Ring addressed the preceding version’s drawbacks. The third iteration’s sensors, seated atop a pronounced 1.3mm flat top, posed a tight fit for swelling fingers. The Oura Ring 4 resolves this, embracing a seamless, uniform design around the entire band.
This latest incarnation sports a singular style yet offers various colour choices: black, brushed silver, gold, silver and rose gold. Expanding inclusivity, sizing now ranges from US size 4 to 15, catering to a broader audience.
There’s a shift in material too; the Oura Ring is now crafted exclusively from titanium, ditching the hybrid build of titanium and epoxy resin seen in the Oura Ring 3. This alteration aligns the Oura Ring 4 with its competition, shaving off up to 0.8g depending on size - not the most lightweight in the market but a noticeable reduction from its predecessor.
Battery life
Oura has lauded a modest boost in the Oura Ring 4’s battery life – it now lasts a day longer than the prior generation, offering an estimated seven and a half days on a full 80-minute charge.
While commendable, this enhancement still doesn’t surpass the longevity found in several other smart rings. The Samsung Galaxy Ring boasts up to nine days, while the RingConn Gen 2’s charge can stretch to an impressive 12 days. Additionally, both rivals come equipped with portable charging cases, significantly extending their battery life to weeks or even up to 150 days.
In contrast, the Oura Ring 4 lacks a portable charging case, making it less convenient for frequent travellers. Without the charging dock, it becomes essentially unusable once the ring is out of power.
Performance
Against the Samsung Galaxy Ring’s more limited scope of health metrics, the Oura Ring 4 excels, providing all essentials and surpassing expectations. Its app transcends platform barriers, with compatibility across both iOS and Android ecosystems. A standout update in the Oura Ring 4 is its revolutionary approach to health data measurement. Eschewing the traditional dome sensors, it introduces Smart Sensing technology, deploying light beams for precise data capture from its array of sensors.
This breakthrough rectifies a frequent gripe with earlier models, securing consistent data collection irrespective of ring alignment on the finger. The ring maintains accurate health tracking even when rotated halfway around the finger.
Moreover, the Oura Ring 4 boasts a suite of embedded sensors tallying vital health indicators. Its array includes red and infrared LEDs for nocturnal blood oxygen level assessment, green and infrared PPG sensors for pivotal cardiac metrics, and a digital thermometer for detecting variations in body temperature. Furthermore, it monitors an extensive list of additional health indices, far too many to list in full.
Application
The newly reimagined Oura app distils the user interface into three intuitive tabs. The “Today” tab, which emerges by default, supplies crucial health insights that are immediately relevant to you, such as your current physical state, the prior night’s sleep analysis, and a recap of recent physical activities.
The “My Health” tab offers a holistic snapshot of your wellness, complete with weekly reports that shed light on fluctuations in your health data. Other tabs delivers an array of additional health insights that might pique your interest, encompassing metrics like overall body condition, sleep patterns, exercise objectives, daytime heart rate, and stress levels throughout the day. Although the quantity of data tracked could seem formidable when set against other apps, it is delivered in an unfussy, straightforward fashion to facilitate effortless comprehension of your health in real-time.
Emphasising daily stress factors, which are pivotal in the landscape of health, the app delivers a digestible representation of stress via empirical data, enhancing your grasp on the genesis of stress. The app’s novel timeline feature is particularly useful, allowing you to identify periods of heightened stress and, by extension, the potential triggers contributing to increased stress levels.
Boasting over 50 metrics for scrutiny, the Oura Ring 4 also enables you to create personalised tabs based on your selected data to present a complete picture of your health.
Conclusion
The Oura Ring 4 verges on perfection but is not without its flaws. A glaring omission is the lack of a portable charging case, a convenience now commonplace among its rivals, which may prove a sticking point for those who frequently travel. Moreover, to unlock the full spectrum of health metrics, a paid subscription is compulsory, priced at an annual US$70, with a complimentary one-month trial period included upon the Oura Ring 4’s purchase. Considering the smart ring’s base cost of US$349, this can add up to a significant supplementary outlay.
While the Samsung Galaxy Ring remains Oura’s biggest competitor, offering an app free of charge as we previously wrote, the Oura app contends to be worth the expenditure, supporting use of the Oura Ring 4 without subscription at a basic level. For those seeking an intricate understanding of their health, the Oura Ring 4 could be the preferred choice. But for users where the subscription is prohibitive, other commendable choices like the Samsung Galaxy Ring and RingConn Gen 2 stand as worthy options.
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