RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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A good health tracker should really only have two main goals: provide accurate tracking and be comfortable.
The accuracy bit feels fairly black and white. For a health device to be useful, the data it collects needs to be correct. But the comfort element is more nuanced. In the past decade-plus that health trackers have become ever-increasingly popular, I’ve tried my fair share of them, and there has not been one I felt I could wear nonstop day in and day out.
The Oura Ring 5 , which was released on June 4, isn’t perfect, but the fifth-generation smart ring has gotten closer than any health tracker before it in becoming a gadget that you don’t need to or want to take off.
The Oura Ring 5 outdoes itself and other smart rings with a significantly smaller design, greater comfort, and superior health tracking.
On the hardware side, the biggest update is that the smart ring is 40% smaller and lighter than its predecessor, the Ring 4. This makes the Oura Ring 5 the slimmest smart ring currently on the market, and one of the smallest wearables available.
$399 gets you a black or silver model or $499 for the brushed silver, deep rose, gold, or stealth versions. This isn’t all that different from the price of the Oura 4 when it first came out in 2024, when the price ranged from $349 for a silver or black model to $499 for the gold and rose gold.
Before testing out the Oura Ring 5, I had been wearing either the Apple Watch or the Oura 4 Ceramic . Both of them fulfilled their purposes—the Apple Watch tracked my running workouts and the Oura 4 gave me a deeper dive into my sleep, heart rate variability, and overall health—but they were never something that I got used to wearing. I could never ‘forget I was wearing it’ like the devices are meant to do. I could never sleep well with a Whoop or an Apple Watch strapped to my wrist, nor could I shower or do the dishes with the Oura Ring 4 loosely stuck to my finger for fear that it would slip off.
It turns out for comfort, smaller wearables really are better. The Oura Ring 5 is 6.09mm wide and 2.28mm thick. Ffor comparison, the Oura Ring 4 is 7.9mm wide and roughly 2.88mm thick, according to Oura. This degree of downsizing really does make a difference. I found that, for the first time ever, I stopped noticing that I was wearing it, and when I did, it didn’t bother me.
Not only does this mean that the Oura Ring 5 is more comfortable to wear, but it also means that it’ll actually do the job it is meant to do. (It's impossible for a wearable to track your sleep if you find it so uncomfortable that you end up taking it off in the middle of the night without remembering you did so.)
According to Oura, the Ring 5 includes more powerful LED sensors that should translate into more consistent heart rate readings and has stronger signal pathways that should be more accurate on different finger types and skin tones.
There are a few other small improvements on the hardware side that are worth noting. The Oura Ring 5 is waterproof up to 100 meters and is IP68-rated, which means you can do most normal, everyday things like showering, exercising, and washing your hands and dishes, and you can even go in a sauna without damaging it. All of this is fairly standard for wearables these days. This rating doesn’t mean that the smart ring is indestructible, however, as Oura advises against things like scuba diving or jet skiing. Even so, I did find myself a tad bit nervous at first showering or doing dishes with the Ring 5 on as I was worried soap would make it accidentally slip off, but it never did.
The battery life also got a bump. The Oura Ring 4 boasted a total battery life of about five to seven days, and I found that to be pretty accurate. With all-day use, I only need to charge it around every fifth day. The Oura Ring 5 increases that battery life to anywhere from six to nine days. Over the past few weeks that I’ve been testing, I found that one battery charge would get me to around six days, and that was with heavy use; I logged all my workouts and daily walks and never took it off for the night. The other nice thing about the battery is that charging it is fairly quick. A full recharge usually took me about one hour, and over the past several days I experimented with daily recharges, which took about 15 minutes or less.
The proprietary charger itself is fairly unchanged from Oura’s previous iteration, and the most annoying thing about it still exists. While the smart ring easily clicks into place on the charging pad, there’s no lock or magnet strong enough to hold it down. The Oura Ring 5 literally falls out if you flip the charger upside down, which means you could lose it more easily if, say, it was unintentionally knocked off. To that end, Oura does sell a travel case that closes shut, which you could use as your regular charger, too, but it will cost you an extra $100 and only works with your specific ring size. For example, a size 8 ring is incompatible with a charger designed for a size 7 ring. The regular charger works this way, too.
The entire premise behind making the Oura Ring smaller is to get people to wear it every day, all day long, and I think the hardware really succeeds on that front. The other component, though, is creating software that makes wearing the smart ring all day actually worth it—and Oura keeps going in the right direction on this front, too.
For example, I found that the Oura Ring 5’s sleep tracking excels at accurately identifying when I’ve fallen asleep versus when I am lying in bed staring at my phone. This feature made me realize just how much less sleep I am getting than I thought I was.
The Oura Ring 5’s sleep tracking provides a ton of other data, as it did with previous models. This data is not all that different from other wearables on the market. Because I’ve tracked my sleep over extended periods of time on numerous wearables, I’ve come to realize that I am far less interested in the nitty-gritty of my sle...
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