by In a world where you can get smart versions of almost everything from speakers and watches to water bottles and running shoes, I find smart rings particularly intriguing. In a way, they’re the perfect wearable – understated, stylish, and able to blend seamlessly with the rest of your outfit. However, they are far too small to pack a screen, so all the data collected is only available in the relevant app.
Of all the smart ring offerings currently available, the Oura Ring is the best known and most used, topping our list of the best sleep trackers. Geared more towards sleep and stress monitoring than pure fitness, the Oura Generation 3 is a solid wellness tracker, with seven temperature sensors monitoring your “recovery time”, an updated heart rate sensor and a readiness metric like Garmin or Fitbit.
A screenless wearable like most other smart rings, the Oura Ring is a chunky but pretty ring that can be worn on the index finger. Of course, if you don’t have a physical screen, you’ll need to open the app to see your stats – unless you own one of the best Apple Watches.
You might be wondering the point of owning two wellness-focused wearables, but Oura has done its best to fit into Apple’s health economy. Several new features have been introduced, including an Oura app for watchOS that lets you get all your details and health data on your wrist, including sleep, readiness and activity data. You can also add Oura metrics to your watch face.
On iOS 16 and later, Oura also introduced widgets that allow you to view your Oura stats on your home screen. These widgets are customizable and can display your sleep score, readiness score, activity score, ring battery level, activity goal progress, daily exercise, body temperature graph, and heart rate graph.
So why would Apple Watch users consider spending more money on an Oura Ring when they already have a perfectly good wearable? For some users, it will be a matter of constant monitoring, battery life, and how you use your watch.
If you charge your watch overnight (which you probably are if you’re a power user, unless you have something with longer battery life like the Apple Watch Ultra), don’t use your Apple Watch’s sleep tracking features, since you don’t do this, you will always have the watch with you.
The Oura Ring can help fill those gaps, as it’s much easier to wear comfortably overnight and means you can still feed Apple Health info without being tethered to your watch. The battery life of up to seven days is much better than the 18 hours that Apple offers, or 36 hours if you’re an Apple Watch Ultra user.
Oura Rings also tracks data that the Apple Watch doesn’t have. Apple Watches don’t offer recovery metrics like Fitbit and Garmin. So by using an Oura Ring in conjunction with your Apple Watch, you can see how ready you are for your next long run. In addition to the “recovery time” mentioned above, which looks for the absence of stress signals, Oura can even monitor the time you spend in bed versus the time you actually sleep. It’s a very sophisticated piece of kit, albeit a very specialized one.
Apple Watches, on the other hand, are technology generalists. They’re great for staying connected on the go, reading notifications, emails and other messages, monitoring specific workouts, and more: there’s a very good reason why it’s perhaps the most popular smartwatch brand out there .
Poor battery life does hamper wellness monitoring opportunities, but if you can afford the pricey Oura subscription, the ring effectively decouples the wellness aspect from the physical watch, meaning your data is logged even while the watch is charging.
For a certain segment of users, this new integration will make the Oura Ring a must-buy. Others might not like the idea of constant sleep tracking, like the sleep expert I interviewed about the usefulness of fitness watches.
