I put on the Oura Ring smart ring for the first time during the summer of 2021 and have been using it continuously since then. It’s still the piece of wearable tech I’ve worn the most and it’s unusual for a product to be this tacky.
But recently I began to wonder what the future holds. The answers I get are not that positive and that makes me wonder how much longer I will be on my toes.
Why I love the Oura ring
Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
I want to start with why I still wear the Oura ring. First, I like the way it looks. I recently switched to the silver version of the third generation ring and I think I prefer it to the shiny black version I was wearing before. It is less noticeable on the finger, but still shines through in the sun. I find it extremely comfortable, it never becomes offensive and I can happily wear it 24 hours a day. That’s a lot more than can be said for some smartwatches. It has picked up some dings and scratches, and here they appear more than on the glossy black version, but less so than on the Stealth design I first tried.
Next, I like the reliability of the Oura ring. It syncs without problems, it has never failed to record activity or sleep, and the data displayed in the app is clear and understandable. This is exactly what I want from wearable health products. I’m also pleased with the battery life, as after six months of using the third generation silver model, I’m still getting about five days of use out of it. However, I’m not really sure how long the battery will sustain this performance. Digital Trends Mobile Staff Writer Christine Chan also wears a third-generation Oura ring, and after a year the battery in her ring only lasts about two days.
I love that I can still track health and activity when wearing a traditional watch and how it never looks out of place or overly technical. It blends in but still gets a fair amount of attention, and people often ask me if it’s an Oura ring and if I like it. Until recently, I’ve always been very positive when answering, stating how long I wear it, how interesting and useful the sleep data is, and how much I appreciate the good battery life. The only downside I mentioned is the subscription, which I still find very problematic. But now other negative things creep into my mind when I think about recommending the Oura ring.
Oura has new (and limited) tricks
Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
To understand what changes my mind, we need to talk about the features of Our Ring. Since I last wrote about wearing the Oura Ring in May 2022, both the blood oxygen (Sp02) and exercise heart rate features have arrived — but only after disappearing in action since late 2021 when they were announced.
Your Sp02 levels are monitored throughout the night, and the app displays your standard blood oxygen percentage, plus an overview of whether fluctuations in it may have changed your breathing. It’s informative, as the app breaks down how critical each recorded disturbance is, but it’s hard to understand what you need to do about it. It is also unfortunate that the option to run all day is not available, even in reduced capacity.
Heart rate monitoring during exercise appeared in May this year and covers walking, cycling and running, and shows the maximum, minimum and average heart rate. It also provides insight into how hard you’ve worked, along with a map of your route if you’ve been exercising outdoors. It’s a handy (albeit basic) fitness tracker that—combined with sleep data—helps give you better insight into your daily fitness.
The Oura Ring app gives a clear picture of your general health on a daily basis. You can dig deeper to see more details, including daily average heart rate information, recovery time, and detailed information about when you sleep. You can also see heart rate variability (HRV) data, but this is quite complicated to interpret, as there are no simple baseline values that apply to most people, unlike heart rate. I can see my HRV fluctuating, but I have no real idea if it’s good or bad and how to change it (or not) if it is. The problem of not being able to easily interpret or act on the collected data is not unique to the Oura Ring, and is a complaint that applies to most health and fitness wearables.
While I’m pleased that Sp02 and exercise heart rate tracking have arrived, they’ve been a long time coming, and Oura hasn’t changed in slow feature releases as other previously announced features aren’t ready yet. The more often this happens, the worse I look at the product and the more worried I am about its future.
More features to come — at some point
Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
When Oura announced heart rate monitoring during exercise, it also said that new exercise options would be added over the coming months. But after six months, no one else arrived. A general mode of exercise can’t be that complicated to add, and given that many people may regularly do activities other than walking, running or cycling (I know I do), it’s hard not to be able to add them to the Oura app very easily.
This is not really solutionsbecause it’s hard to justify buying two wearables when one can or should do the job.
To overcome this, you can wear an Apple Watch, as the Oura app syncs with Apple Health or a Google Fit-enabled smartwatch to track other exercises. The Oura Ring also syncs with Strava, which fills in some gaps, but it’s still a platform focused on running, swimming, and riding—plus, it also needs another wearable. This is not really solutionsbecause it’s hard to justify buying two wearables when one can or should do the job.
Despite a blog post in November talking about the imminent arrival of a similarly promised new sleep phase algorithm, it’s still not available for my Oura Ring. In an email sent to Our Ring owners, the company said the new sleep stage algorithm will arrive as a beta feature in the app, with an option to turn it on if you’re invited to try it out. There doesn’t appear to be a full, public launch date for the improved sleep stage tracking at this point, which is disappointing given the hype surrounding it and the fact that it was used in promotional material for the third generation. ring more than a year ago.
The slowness of updates from Our continues to frustrate. It’s an expensive product with a subscription package attached, and waiting for new features — with limited information on when they’ll actually arrive — isn’t something I’m looking forward to, and it’s becoming less acceptable as time goes on. This also raises another, larger concern. I’m still waiting for the features that were announced last year to arrive, but more importantly, I also haven’t heard what’s next in Oura. And that’s another kind of problem.
Time frames — and the future
Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
It’s pretty clear that the new smartphone will have hardware changes that facilitate new features and therefore require an upgrade, but the Oura can only go with the ring design and only have so many new sensors it can fit inside. What it does with those sensors and the software around it is Oura’s selling point. Oura charges a monthly subscription fee to keep seeing your data in its app, so it needs a clear roadmap for new features and software improvements to provide enough motivation to continue paying long-term.
But there isn’t one, and even if there were, would I trust any timeline? The answer is increasingly no, and the longer I wait to see already promised features on my Oura Ring, the less I’ll trust any release of newly announced features. We’re now a year into the third-generation product, and unfortunately, with missing features and no information about what the future holds, the appeal of paying monthly for Oura Ring is diminishing.
With missing features and no information about what the future holds, the appeal of paying monthly for Oura Ring is diminishing.
When high-end health and fitness products like the Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch Ultra don’t come with a subscription package but regularly receive significant feature updates, the Oura Ring leaves me feeling annoyed. I really like the hardware and still find the app and its data to be useful, but Oura’s heel-dragging breaks trust and her silence on what I have to look forward to is troubling.
My continued experience with the Oura ring convinces me that smart rings have huge potential in tracking health and fitness, but it’s starting to look like more concept smart rings that I love. The Oura ring is on my finger, but the company is in danger of taking it off if it doesn’t meet my daily needs, now and in the future. This is a serious problem because once someone takes the wearable off, there’s a good chance they won’t be able to put it back on.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn