Oura did not originate the smart ring category. It did, however, make all that came before it obsolete. The category is well over a decade old; TechCrunch covered an NFC ring in 2013.

The Motiv Ring is much more recent, but it lacked an appropriate use case when it was sold off to a digital security company at the moment when the pandemic crested on American shores.

Originating in the United States, the company Oura was founded in 2013 and introduced its first ring via Kickstarter two years later. It was COVID-19, though, that really propelled the company to public consciousness with high-profile partnerships with sports leagues. Attention was most garnered as the NBA began to use the ring to catch early indicators of sickness while teams played in the bubble.

A passive fitness tracker model was finally successful. Rather than viewing the small form factor and the lack of a display as a detriment to the product's efficacy, the company leaned into a model wherein such passivity is more feature than bug.

Out of this, Oura CEO Tom Hale recently told me that nearly two-thirds of its users own some other wearable. This is a very important data point when thinking about the role of this product in the larger wearable fitness space. To name a few things, it suggests a product that can play nicely alongside Apple Watch-like devices rather than trying to compete directly against them.

It beeps, buzzes, and flashes to get your attention, like other smartwatches. Of course, there's something of the rhetoric around freeing up the wearer from having to stare constantly at a phone, but it's always there competing for instant availability sometimes as a good thing. If you're actively working out, say, or if you are the type of person who needs a little haptic motivation to get in your steps each day.

Though pretty enough for the job, the Oura Ring is designed to be forgotten. It is, after all, a simple task for a ring– doubly so for the Oura Ring 4. Not much has been done to change the ring itself; the ring is still a minimalist metal band. The inside is a little flatter, thanks to recessed sensors. It's a small difference, certainly, but it drastically improves the comfort level of the ring.

I'm one of those who never took Oura or similar devices because I simply dislike how rings feel (sorry, ladies). Sensors of older models, irregularly structured, didn't make things any better. After a week of wearing the Oura 4, I can confirm the new ring feels much comfier than its predecessor.

That's probably also owing, in part, to an extended size range, which now goes from four to 15. Though I've worn the last two iterations of rings, Oura sent me another sizing kit since apparently, everything has changed. At any rate, the ring is comfortable enough now that I don't really feel it at all most of the time.

The whole game is blending in. That is a lot of why sleep was a cornerstone very early on. I could be sleeping better. Most people reading this probably could say the same. But wearing a smartwatch to bed no doubt impedes many folks' ability to fall or stay asleep. A ring, on the other hand, is entirely manageable.

More importantly, however, is the battery question, which remains the biggest weakness in the Apple Watch. The company continued to tinker with its software, but, as it is, people who want to wear their device for both activity tracking and sleep tracking are going to have to carve out time to charge the thing before bed.

Another strength of passive tracking is that it uses rings that provide far less room to insert a battery. So, even though the ring is little or worse, the lack of power-hungry elements like a display goes a long way toward extending battery life by days rather than hours.

Battery life: Oura says the Ring 4 tops out at eight days on a charge, versus the Ring 3's seven. I made it four days my first pass-around before my phone spat out an alert that I really should top it off before bed time. Not quite the maximum as Oura suggests, but again, this is apples and oranges compared to what we have with Apple Watch.

Activity tracking, however, is pretty tough to sell on smart rings. The lack of display in the product is definitely one of its selling points concerning the aspect of sleep hygiene; but with regard to daytime fitness, this is a whole another matter.

Oura has a few features intended to nudge the user, and it sends many of those nudges as notifications through the phone. So it will remind you to stand up and stretch your legs if you've been sitting for more than 50 minutes. And it will let you know if you are halfway to reaching your activity goals. Those sorts of nudges apart, though, the smart ring does not rely on the kind of gamification strategy that has lured so many people into wearing wrist-worn devices.

It's not hard to see why so many Oura users opt to sport these devices side by side. Over the course of this last week and change, using the Ring 4 with the Apple Watch Series 10, it's pretty clear that these products play well together. Unlike other fitness trackers, the Oura Ring is designed to track far more subtle health trends over much longer swaths of time.

For that reason, it generally takes a bit of wearing to develop a baseline to provide more complex insights. Above heart rate monitoring and exercise minutes, Oura is working to give a fuller picture of health. Things like Readiness and Stress-things that can't be quantified with a single sensor's metrics.

Oura has made it clear that the Ring sits at the base of a wider health ecosystem play. That's what drives the reason for the company's recent acquisition of Veri, which finds Oura planting its flag in the world of blood sugar monitoring. Smart ring manufacturers have shown that plenty can be done around the finger.

The future of the company goes deep into expanding the metrics it is collecting and using new tools like foundational models to tailor insights more accurately. For those things that cannot be done with the form factor, like glucose monitoring, Oura will rely on third-party devices.

Over the course of wearing the new Ring, I found it worked pretty well in concert with the Apple Watch, whether it's to take workouts that are incorporated into its own stats or to send progress notifications to the wrist-worn device. At launch, the Oura Ring 4 is a minor upgrade over its predecessor, all told. If you picked up a Ring 3 in the past year, the FOMO shouldn't keep you up at night. The greatest improvement is comfort, specifically a flush interior.

It's a software play at its core. That was clear when the company switched to a subscription service relatively early, and it remains clear as it rolls out features through its Oura Labs testing platform. The Oura Ring is at its core just a handful of sensors wrapped around your finger. The real value is in how that information is used.