Received my Oura Ring 3rd Gen

I’m one of the first people that received the Oura Ring 3rd generation. I actually ordered the 2nd generation back in September, but they didn’t have stock anymore of the product thus giving me an upgrade in trade for waiting 2-3 months.

My initial impressions are great in some aspects but disappointing in others.

The first night sleeping with the Oura Ring was unnoticeable. The ring fits around my finger, isn’t too tight or too loose as well. Which meant it was comfortable to sleep within comparison with (smart)watches.

The magic was waking up and seeing the statistics of my sleep though. I couldn’t believe how accurate it was. I usually have a good sense on how well and deep I slept the previous night. You can’t really quantify sleep with hours. Sometimes I sleep 8 hours, but I still wake up as if I only slept 4 hours. The other way around happens to where I slept 6 hours but feels like I slept 10.

The latter was one of those nights and the Oura ring gave me the correct pattern on how deep I slept and the efficiency. I usually sleep with Sleep Cycle as well, but honestly, that isn’t always accurate. Sleep Cycle gives you a good sense, but sometimes you know it was completely wrong.

But the Oura Ring was immediately very accurate. This gave me a great initial expression and according to more scientific reviews, that’s what they are the best at. Sleep tracking.

Thus that was great, but then I was disappointed after waking up. I usually go to the gym right in the morning straight. Thus I was doing cardio to test out the supposed 24/7 heart rate monitor of the ring.

The results weren’t pretty and truly hope it was an edge-case. The app indicated that my BPM was below 70 the entire cardio session, where usually my BPM is between 120-170 according to my Apple Watch. Thus an immense difference. I hope that there isn’t something wrong with my heart-rate sensor and next time it gives me better recordings.

The rest of the day went well though.

All in all, I really like the Oura Ring and like it way more than a ‘Smartwatch’. I never really liked smartwatches except for the functionality to provide me with health information. The Oura Ring can now do that for me and thus I can wear normal watches again or nothing around my wrist at all which is great.

One less digital screen in my life.