u/AlrightAlbatross

I have been trying to pick a smartring to replace an Apple Watch for vitals and sleep tracking, while continuing to use the Apple Watch for fitness tracking. I have about 2 weeks of trialing a Ringconn Gen 2 against an Oura.

Summaries of some pros and cons are below, but the tl;dr is that I'm returning the Oura due to significantly worse sleep tracking, higher price + subscription, and less transparent vitals metrics.

Ringconn

• Biggest con: the LED sensors bleed more light in the dark than the Oura ring. This may be because the Ringconn sensors are raised, while the current gen Oura are nearly flat. I'd ballpark the Ringconn being 2-3x brighter than the Oura at night and the sensors run pretty frequently. This is a big deal for light-sensitive sleepers.
• Biggest pro: price and absence of a subscription fee.
• Other observations:
  • The app has a much "leaner" data presentation than Oura. You get a four-leaf style summary of algorithmic data (sleep, relax, vitals, activity), with a roll-up of actual data immediately below that and more granular data one level deeper in the interface.
  • But the app otherwise is a bit clumsy. The activity recognition isn't very good and I frequently get weird errors about duplicate activities. There are unnecessary text entries all over the main app screen (e.g., "Good sleep makes you energetic").
  • The Ringconn is noticeably slimmer than the Oura, but I found it slightly less comfortable because of the raised sensors.

Oura

• Biggest con: the sleep tracking is straight up bad.
  • It routinely senses any evening inactivity (sitting and reading, watching TV, etc) as "sleep" time and gives a huge latency penalty. You can manually adjust your actual sleep time, but for a device that primarily exists as a sleep tracker it is not acceptable to have to do this every day.
  • The Oura ring sleep data also does not play nicely with Apple Health. Viewing the ring's data through Apple Health shows 20-30 false "awake" incidents every night. Data from similar nights using an Apple Watch or the Ringconn look totally different from Oura.
  • This makes me overall skeptical of the value/accuracy of Oura's other algorithmic tracking metrics.
  • You can find some discussion about this in the Oura sub but any criticism is immediately downvoted away.
• Biggest pro: the hardware and software feel more polished and premium. I really like the etched indicator for the bottom of the ring.
• Other observations:
  • The app relies heavily on algorithmic summaries of sensor data. The underlying data and data trends are not as transparent or quick to find as with Ringconn.
    • This is a personal preference thing--if you are ok with trusting the app's version of green/yellow/red lights then this is fine.
    • I personally prefer to understand the underlying data to track how it correlates to my activity. E.g., if I have a day with a 5-hour bike ride, I would expect to see elevated average HR and depressed HRV. It doesn't do me much good to get a generic warning that I'm "stressed" that day.