Ora's stylish smart ring worn by celebrities and athletes alike has slimmed down for its fourth iteration, making it easier to wear, more comfortable to wear and longer lasting between charges.
The Ring 4 swaps its predecessor's clear plastic internals for shiny titanium. Its weight is still relatively modest – between 3.3g and 5.2g depending on the size – and it comes in an expanded choice of 12 sizes and six finishes, including black, silver, gold and rose gold.
But this level of sophistication doesn't come cheap, costing up to £349 (€399/$349/A$569) and requiring a monthly subscription of £5.99 (€5.99/$5.99/A$9.99) to access anything but basic daily metrics.
The three small sensor domes under your finger inside the new ring have been removed in the Gen 3, leaving two invisible bumps and a row of darkened windows flush to the surface. This makes it very comfortable to wear and very easy to get on and off above the knees.
The 3mm thick ring is twice the depth of a standard wedding band. But Ora says its improvements will allow many of its users to downsize compared to the Gen 3, which will help reduce its impact on nearby fingers.
As the ring rotates around your finger's shape, skin tone and orientation, the improved sensors increase tracking accuracy and reduce gaps where pulse or other readings cannot be accurately detected.
Some of the sensors can be turned off when not needed, which helps extend battery life between charges for the eight Ring 4 size to six days, one day longer than the equivalent Gen 3.
Ora's unique selling point is its comprehensive and effortless sleep tracking as a cornerstone of general health, but it has slowly added more features to monitor daytime health trends for a more complete view.
In addition to basic steps and calorie activity tracking, the rings can monitor heart health and automatically track 40 different workouts with heart rate zones. Ora's comprehensive women's health, fertility and pregnancy monitoring has expanded, and the ring can be used as a natural cycle birth control service.
Its fitness tracking is still basic compared to a running or smartwatch, but Orra can import workouts from third-party services like Strava, helping you get a better picture of your overall health.
Best app now with AI assistant
Ora has adapted its app to help manage the many metrics its rings now collect. The Today tab is dynamic and shows what's happening right now, typically a timeline of your activity, stress, heart rate, and various events of your day such as when you wake up, eat, and exercise. Manually. An array of scores for readiness, sleep, activity, heart rate, and stress provide one-tap access to the top of the page.
The Vitals tab shows all the metrics Ring tracks, grouped under high scores for readiness and sleep, your activity goal, daytime heart rate, and stress. Many scores have baselines, so you can quickly see if things are currently within your normal range. Or you can expand each one to see the various metrics that contribute to the score, including graphs and charts over the last days, weeks or months.
The final tab is My Health, which is for long-term trends such as your resilience to stress and disease, cardiovascular age and capacity, a timeline of your sleep, and various weekly and monthly reports.
The app has two AI features, including a food logging system that uses your phone's camera to recognize what you've eaten and put it on your timeline. It works surprisingly well even for random home-cooked meals, but is ready to chart a proper diet rather than a calorie count.
It also has a new “Oura Advisor” AI chatbot that looks at your health data and tries to steer you toward a goal, offering a little guidance or support. It can check in on you during the day with a notification on your phone to ask how you're feeling, and in my two-week trial it was smart enough to understand that recovery from injury was the reason my daily activity was down. .
Whether this is effective in the long term remains to be seen, but it can at least provide tips and encouragement to those who need guidance on how to improve a specific aspect of their health.
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Overall, the Ora app does a pretty good job of easily interpreting its myriad metrics on a macro and micro scale. It also has nice touches like changing the color of the graph according to stress level and delivering haptic pulses on the phone in time to the recorded heart rate.
Consistency
The Ora Ring 4 is non-repairable and the battery cannot be replaced. The company doesn't give an expected lifespan for the battery, but it should maintain at least 80% of its original capacity after 500 full charge cycles. It contains no recycled materials and Oura does not publish environmental impact statements or offer trade or recycling programs.
Price
The Ora Ring 4 starts at £349 (€399/$349/A$569) with a range of colors and finishes. Ring is free for one month Membership subscription is £5.99 (€5.99/$5.99/A$9.99) per month or £69.99/€69.99/$69.99/A$109.99 annually and is required.
In comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Ring costs £399, the Ultrahuman Ring Air costs £329 and the Apple Watch costs £219.
Judgment
The Oura Ring 4 is a significant improvement in fit and comfort over its predecessors, and it's not remotely like a piece of technology on your finger.
Removing the sensor bumps on the inside of the ring has made life a lot easier, especially since you can wear a slightly smaller size compared to or similar to a regular wedding band.
Its accuracy and battery life improvements are welcome. Ora's best-in-class sleep and general health monitoring, as well as its good usability and reliable synchronization, keep it ahead of increasingly tough competition. If you want accurate health monitoring without wearing technology on your wrist, Ora is the answer.
But the best smart ring on the market doesn't come cheap or cost more than a high-end smartwatch. And anything other than basic data requires a £6 a month subscription.
As with previous Oras, the ring's biggest problem is that it can't be repaired and the battery can't be replaced, eventually draining it and losing a star.
Advantage: Jewelry is not technology, complete sleep and health monitoring, great analysis of trends and useful advice, easy to understand, six-day battery life, 100 meters water resistance, a useful alternative to smartwatch health.
Cons: Expensive, monthly subscription, thick for the ring, run and fitness tracking is weak, doesn't do or can't track and adjust like similarly priced smartwatches.
