Oura Ring 4 Review: The Best Smart Ring Right Now

Price When Reviewed

From $349

Best Prices Today: Oura Ring 4

The Oura Ring 4 is arguably Oura’s most important smart ring because there are more rivals than ever before.

That increased competition led by the Samsung Galaxy Ring along with the likes of Ultrahuman, RingConn, and Circular shows that Oura is not the only smart ring in town.

To keep ahead of the pack, Oura has improved its ring design, promises more accurate tracking, new metrics to help make better decisions about your day (and night), and delivered a better battery life than the Ring Gen 3.

As a long-term Oura Ring Gen 3 user and having also tested pretty much all other smart rings available, the Ring 4 is a reminder that there are things Oura gets right that its rivals haven’t quite cracked yet.

Design & Build

• Available in six color finishes
• Now includes more titanium in design
• Sensor platform sits more discreetly

The Oura Ring’s appeal is partly down to how good it looks and that doesn’t change with the Ring 4. There are six finish options in total. That’s silver (pictured), black, brushed silver, stealth, gold, and rose gold. The silver and black options are the cheapest to go for with gold and rose gold models coming in the most expensive.

One of the most notable changes is the etching on the outside of the ring to serve as a visual reminder that the ring needs to be worn with the sensors sat against the inside of your finger. It’s something that Samsung does on its Galaxy Ring smart ring as well, which is useful but breaks up an otherwise sleek ring.

Those sensors hidden on the underside of that etching now sit more flush with an interior that’s now fully encased in titanium. It makes wearing the ring less noticeable and a bit more comfortable to wear than the Oura Ring Gen 3.

There’s now just a fully circular version available that does keep it in line with the look of rival smart rings. Oura’s Ring still looks different enough and has a generally nicer finish to help it stand out from other rings – Oura users will be happy with the changes.

It still picks up scratches, which Oura has now mentioned on its website will happen with regular wear. It’s not been as bad as the very scratch-friendly Ultrahuman smart ring, but Samsung’s Galaxy Ring does a better job of fending off those visible signs of wear.

In terms of sizing, I was recommended to get a sizing kit as the design changes with the Ring 4 could mean a change in fit from the Ring Gen 3. I ended up going with the same size, though that’s not necessarily going to be the case for all, since there have been some alterations to the hardware and design.

The Ring 4 also offers a wider range of sizes than the previous iteration. You can opt for four through to 15 – the Gen 3 is only available in sizes six to 13. Oura recommends users wear a test ring for at least 24 hours, as fingers can change sizes throughout the day and night.

The Oura Ring’s appeal is partly down to how good it looks and that doesn’t change with the Ring 4

Fitness & Tracking

• Tracks sleep, steps, stress, and heart health
• Improved sensor setup
• Membership required for full access

In essence, the Oura Ring 4 monitors and tracks a lot of the same things the Oura Ring Gen 3 and other smart rings can… but you’ll need to pay for a monthly or annual subscription to access all of those insights.

There’s some new metrics added and perhaps more crucially, a new optical sensor platform that opens up more signal pathways than the previous Oura Ring to improve tracking accuracy. Oura also promises to improve monitoring for different skin tones, finger shapes, and when the ring moves around your finger.

It will track your steps, monitor sleep, stress, temperature, daily heart rate and it’s all geared towards powering Oura’s Readiness metric that will tell you whether you’re in tip-top shape to take on a strenuous day or you should consider taking things easy.

That Readiness metric is only as good as the data that powers it. So making sure you’re getting accurate heart rate, sleep, and exercise data to make sure that Readiness number can be useful.

The biggest issues on the Oura Ring Gen 3 lay with the heart rate and its ability to factor in exercise data, two things Oura has made improvements with, especially on tracking heart rate, during exercise and better compensating for when the sensors might not be sitting in the optimal place.

For exercise, Oura appears to accept its limitations to some degree and while it can automatically detect exercises in a pretty reliable fashion and does give you the ability to record heart rate from workouts when prompted in the app, I still don’t trust it enough to track all of my exercise heart rate more reliably than a dedicated heart rate monitor chest strap. I got some good data, particularly when using it for steady-paced workouts, so if you’re not doing all-out HIIT classes, you might just get the good heart rate data you crave.

That support puts a bigger emphasis on the ability to connect to Strava where I still tracked my workouts from a Garmin or Apple Watch and helped to provide more reliable data points for Readiness