Oura ring review
It was the accessory in last year’s NBA bubble and now has found its way into my life, but how good is the Oura ring?
My girlfriend got me a ring for my birthday. However, it isn’t the kind of ring you are thinking of. Instead, it’s an Oura ring. The glossy black gadget adds to my ever-growing arsenal of various technical gadgets, ranging from the Apple Watch over different headphones up to a DJI Mavic Air. However, the Oura ring is entirely unique.
So before getting into the weeds, what is the Oura ring anyway?
The Oura ring is a health-centered gadget that provides numerous insights into your health. Like the name indicates, rather than being in the form of a watch or even a chest strap, the Oura ring is a ring, making it much less noticeable, especially during sleep.
Design
There are various different versions of the ring, varying in color/materials and form. I got the one which is flat at the top in the regular (glossy) black colorway.
In my opinion, this is a very sleek design, and even though the ring is clearly noticeable, I don’t find it looks extremely prominent or out-of-place intrusive. As it is a ring, there is not much more to the design, as the three sensors are sitting on the inside of the ring and hence aren’t visible for others.
All in all, I believe that the Oura ring has a sleek design and does not draw a lot of attention.
Ordering an Oura ring
Before you can use an Oura ring, you’ll have to order one. As the Oura ring is a ring, sizing is more important than other health tracking gadgets, such as the Apple Watch or other smartwatches.
In order to help you find the right size, you can choose to have a sizing kit delivered and then choose the right size. I found this process to be very convenient and helpful. In the sizing kit come plastic rings in all sizes, but even though they serve as a good sizing tool, they lack the feel of the real Oura ring you’ll get.
After you choose your size and confirm it in your order. After that, it is a matter of days until the Oura ring arrives at your door, or at least it was for me.
Features
Once you get the ring, there is not really much to play around with. Unlike with smartwatches and especially the Apple Watch, where there are many features you can take advantage of as soon as you get it, the Oura ring does not immediately give you something to play with. Instead, you’ll just find yourself going about your day like usual, just with a ring on your finger.
However, after the first nights’ sleep, your first insights are available. Even though they aren’t yet as valuable as when the ring has figured out your rhythm, they are still fun to look at for the first time.
Sleep tracking is the main feature of the ring. Incorporated in it is how long and deep you sleep and your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate, and changes in body temperature. The sensors providing these insights are also used for activity tracking during the day, and they ultimately lead to three indexes available to look at In the Oura app.
There is the readiness meter, the sleep index, and the activity meter. The first two are connected to your sleep, while the latter indicates how active you are throughout the day.
The readiness meter aims to show you how well recovered you are, whereas the sleep index shows you how well you slept and how much time you spent in the various sleep phases.
The third index is the activity meter, which measures your activity throughout the day and guides you towards a daily calorie goal, similar to the Apple Watch.
These three meters are the core of the app, which receives all the information from the ring via a Bluetooth connection from your phone. However, one has to point out that using the app isn’t the most user-friendly experience.
On the one hand, the app shows you the relevant meters at one glance, which is excellent. However, other aspects are not as well thought out. For example, adding a workout is a bit cumbersome because even though the app tries to present you relevant time frames when it thinks you worked out, these need to be altered the proposition of the app. Furthermore, over long training sessions, it often splits them up into two, which is also quite a faff to enter
I specified in the settings that workouts recorded by the Apple Watch are imported, so there is no overlap in these two things, but, notably, tracking activities is cumbersome.
Another part of the app that has similar shortcomings is the trends section. After about two weeks, the ring starts to show you trends on how your bedtime is developing and so on. Unfortunately, even though there is a ton of useful information and many trends that it can show, this isn’t displayed clearly. For example, there are many trends related to sleep, like bedtime, duration, etc., but there are almost too many, which sometimes prevents me from looking because I know that I would search for 30 seconds to find the one I am looking for.
Lastly, the app does not give you access to the current readings of the sensors, which is also unlike other health-centered gadgets. So there is no way (or I haven’t found it after 3 months) to look at your current heart rate or additional insights, for that matter, in the app.
Overall though, for such a small device, the Oura ring has an impressive feature set, ranging from monitoring heart rate & heart rate variability to changes in body temperature. The app provides many insights, yet they aren’t always presented conveniently and logically.
Usability and durability
As previously mentioned, using the Oura ring is unlike using other smart health-centered gadgets like the Apple Watch. Due to its ring form factor, there is no way to interact with the device other than the app, making it much less noticeable than a watch that can display notifications.
Personally, I wear my Oura ring all the time, except when it has to charge. Charging is done via a small platform that connects to a power brick via USB-C and does not take much time. Furthermore, I get about four days and nights out of its battery, which I find extremely impressive for such a tiny device.
With a gadget that sits on your finger, durability is a central concern. After close to three months of use, my ring has some scratches, and little bits of the black coating have come up. However, as aforementioned, I wear it all the time, whether while cleaning, practicing American football, or cooking and doing the dishes.
Hence, I fully expected those signs of constant wear. Apart from these superficial damages, the ring still is as comfortable and sturdy as it was on the first day. I believe if you are willing to take into account occasional scratches and some coming off of color, wearing the ring all the time is no problem and seems exceptionally durable to me.
Verdict
In my opinion, the Oura ring is a fantastic sleep tracker and an average activity monitor. It has a great battery life and a ton of sensors that provide some interesting insights into your sleep and your sleep patterns.
The Oura ring is for all the people looking for a small but powerful health-centered gadget. Its design is sleek enough to wear it anywhere, and the built sturdy enough to survive the most demanding environments.
However, suppose you are looking to replace another health-centered device with the Oura ring. In that case, you’ll have to dig a bit deeper, as the ring only excels as a sleep tracker, in my opinion, and not as a workout companion.
So, if you are on the verge of buying an Oura ring, I’d say that you won’t be disappointed, but if you are just looking for a gadget, I doubt that the ring will satisfy your needs as well as other options out there.
As always, stay safe
Raffael
