If you’re thinking about a smart ring as the more comfortable choice to track your activity, the Oura Ring 4 brings plenty to the table. Whether or not you’ve heard of Oura before, the Finnish brand continues to impress with its smart rings, and this is its latest major release.
Smart rings remain a nascent category without a lot of options but that’s changing. The Samsung Galaxy Ring is a good indication that bigger players are likely to enter the fray at some point. Then there are the startups trying to make their own mark.
The Oura Ring 4 is very much a trend-setter because it’s supposed to be. A refined ring that feels like the real deal, yet also has enough sensory technology inside to track things like exercise and sleep. I tested one for six weeks and here’s what you can expect if you choose to slide one on yourself.
Finding the Oura Ring 4 for you
Oura addresses a few key things off the bat. For one, ring sizes range from 4-15, which is almost unheard of in this category. You need to get the $10 sizing kit first to know which one fits you best. Oura recommends wearing the Ring 4 on the index, middle finger or ring finger based on its own sizing guide. The kit gives you plain versions of all 12 sizes, so you can try them out at your leisure before you actually buy the real thing. Personally, I recommend you wear a size for at least 24 hours to get a feel for how tight or loose it will be as you go through your day and sleep at night.
As for the ring itself, it comes in silver, brushed silver, gold, rose gold, black and stealth. It’s made with a titanium body for extra durability and sticks to a standard wedding band-style look. It lacks the concave indents of the Galaxy Ring, leaving the entire surface exposed. The coating is nice, but not impervious to scratches if there’s too much friction with tough surfaces. Lifting weights definitely comes to mind, so it’s best to wear the Ring 4 with gloves on to add a layer of protection.
Design and comfort
More importantly, Oura manages to remove any protruding sensors from previous models and delivers a smart ring that’s flat across the inner side. Not that the onboard sensors aren’t visible, along with two LEDs, but you only really see them when taking the ring off. The lights reflect off your skin, usually for a low battery.
There’s a small visible slit on the bottom of the outer side as a reminder of how to wear it. That part should always be facing down from your finger. What’s cool is the Ring 4 can still take an accurate reading if it twists up to 30-degrees either way. That’s key to maintaining accuracy for any activity or sleep, and it seems to hold true here.
You might consider the Ring 4 a bit thick, especially compared to your average band but it’s also hard to pack in multiple sensors in something this small. It never bothered me because I never felt like the ring got in my way. More often than not, I would forget I was wearing it. One time, I hadn’t even realized the battery died. Your experience may differ, which is why finding the best fit from the sizing kit makes sense down the line.
While Oura changed the battery charging dock from the previous model, it still chooses not to make it a charging case, like those for wireless earbuds. As is, the Ring 4 just falls into its cradle to charge but is totally exposed and can easily fall out if you try to carry them together. A case would remove that threat and make it easier to take with you when you’re not using it.
Setup and Oura app
The setup process isn’t all that hard. You can use the Oura Ring 4 with an iPhone or Android phone via the Oura app. The ring can’t integrate apps or features the way smartwatches and fitness trackers can. It doesn’t light up when a call comes in and has no haptics to buzz you when a notification comes in. It’s not that kind of wearable; it’s passive by design.
The app plays a critical role here because it’s where you visualize what the Ring 4 tracks. It feels more intuitive better laid out than before. Three tabs at the bottom—Today, Vitals, My Health—are your main conduits to the data. Today gives you a snapshot of the basics, like sleep data, daytime stress and heart rate, complete with scores for things like readiness and activity on top of that.
Vitals lets you dig deeper to go beyond the scores and find some context. For instance, under Readiness, you can check body temperature, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, resting heart rate and sleep regularity. Tap any one of them and you see a graph showing whatever patterns or fluctuations the ring tracked. Since Readiness is an aggregated score of those metrics, it tries to flag results that could affect how good you feel for the next day.
What I like about this is it doesn’t look confusing. Tapping any of the “Readiness contributors” gives you a short rundown on what each of them mean and how to interpret feedback. Not only that, but the same layout applies for sleep, activity, daytime heart rate and daytime stress. One that should keep many honest is “Stay active”, which measures your inactive time while awake and recommends no more than eight hours per day.
Subscription required
There’s more to cover but you should also know that after the first 30 days, Oura requires you to subscribe to keep all the features unlocked. That’s $7.99 per month or $89.99 annually in Canada. If you don’t pay up, you basically lose out on almost all the main tracking features available. The app only shows your Readiness, Sleep and Activity scores with little else.
This is why you have to sign up for an Oura account and provide billing information from the start. It’s on you to cancel the subscription before the first 30 days are up or else it automatically kicks in. I suggest budgeting the monthly or annual fee into buying the Ring 4 because it’s at its best without any restrictions.
Activity tracking and wellness
The Oura Ring 4 can’t match a smartwatch or fitness tracker in certain ways, like a screen, onboard GPS and room for extra sensors, but it’s still impressive. It can automatically detect up to 40 different exercises and can utilize the GPS connection from your paired phone to give you routes, distance and location data.
All of that proves useful, as do the supporting features to motivate you. One of my favourites to check while testing was Cardiovascular Age. While it was nice to see the app tell me my heart is functioning well for a man my age, the competitor in me wanted to try turning back the clock. Oura can’t provide deep insight into how to do that, though recommends things you’d expect, like being more active and eating healthier.
This ties in to how the ring tracks heart rate during exercise, laying out which heart rate zones you fall into while active. The Ring 4 is also quite good at knowing when you start and stop an exercise to help with overall accuracy but I can’t be sure it’s like that for all 40 exercises. In my case, it knew when I started riding my bike but if I stayed still for too long, it would assume I was done. Starting back up again resumed tracking, and the app was smart enough not to list them as two distinct workouts.
The more (or less) you move, the more detailed data gets in the Readiness, Vitals and My Health sections. Thus, the Ring 4 feels like a passive wearable when it’s actually keeping tabs on your daily routine. The only catch is you may have to manually edit your workout in the app after in case it doesn’t actually know what kind of exercise you actually did.
Sleep tracking
That also goes for sleep tracking, which is arguably where the Ring 4 really shines. Not only is it consistent noting when I actually fell asleep and woke up, but also how I slept. I’m lucky in that I sleep soundly just about every night but it didn’t feel like that for a few nights while wearing the ring. The app noted that with scores for sleep stages, efficiency and restfulness that made sense, especially when it came to breaking down deep sleep, light sleep and REM.
It’s also superb at recognizing wake-ups in between or if your body was particularly restless. Take a nap and it knows the duration for that too. The accuracy, as great as it is, stands out more because of how the app presents the information to you. Graphs are easy to read, as are the ideal scores and insights. If you’ve consumed too much alcohol, the ring might bring that up if you didn’t sleep all that well. If you didn’t get enough sleep, it may point to stress as a cause.
Granted, the ring is only guessing at these things unless you manually input some data, like whether you had some drinks or are feeling a little stressed out. The Ring 4 also tracks your blood oxygen and body temperature as you sleep, adding key metrics you might want to know.
I should note the ring doesn’t have any AFib (atrial fibrillation) tracking, so it won’t detect unusual breathing patterns. That also means it can’t act as an early warning in case of sleep apnea. That’s a feature more in line with smartwatches but I expect Oura to try integrating it in its next ring.
Battery life
The Oura Ring 4 is set to last up to eight days based on company estimates but you’re more likely to see it die after seven days. That’s not bad for a smart ring, except the ring size matters. Larger ones have bigger batteries so you may get to eight days if you’re wearing a 13-15 whereas you’ll barely hit a week with a 4-7.
I tested an 11, so didn’t mind the week-long lifespan, though had to remember that it takes 80 minutes to fully charge it. Since it’s a dock and not a case, you can’t charge it easily while commuting.
Final thoughts
If you worry about potentially losing the Ring 4, fear not—at least as an iPhone user. Find My Ring works with iOS devices to help you locate the ring if you’ve forgotten or misplaced it. As of this review, that feature hasn’t reached Android phones yet.
Oura Labs in the app is an interesting section that aims to give you more insight by chatting with an artificial intelligence Oura advisor based on running through a test. You could also try Meals, where you take photos of plates and beverages for an AI assistant to analyze. There are even third-party app integrations with the likes of Strava, Wild AI, Noom, Zero, Headspace, Flo, Glow, Clue and Natural Cycles.
There are even more intriguing features beyond that. This ring takes an ambitious chance at covering a lot of ground and doing so in ways that matter. It’s not worth wearing one long-term without going ahead with the subscription. That makes the whole package more expensive but it can feel worth it when you dive into the features available.
The Oura Ring 4 is available now in multiple colours and sizes at Best Buy. Check out all the latest smart rings.
