Oura Ring 4 Stealth, Size 10

Note: This is a long term review, after owning the ring for 10 months. It disappoints me to have to give this a 1 star review, because when the ring works, it works. It’s very convenient, accurate, un-intrusive to wear, and gives you a ton of valuable data, especially related to your cardiovascular system. But, out of the blue about 10 months into my ownership, battery life has cratered, and even when it doesn’t run fully discharged, it has randomly started disconnecting, meaning it’s not harvesting the data that I expect and want it to, and even worse, without full days of data, it won’t build any trends, meaning the limited data it does collect is useless. Reading online it seems I am not the only person experiencing this disappointment. Oura’s customer service is non existent. I have yet to figure out how to get in contact with a human there. All their customer service is routed through “Finn” their AI assistant. After trying everything that “Finn” has recommended numerous times, and getting nowhere, it would be an understatement to say I am frustrated. One of “Finn’s” suggestions is to fully wipe the ring and app from your phone and reinstall it, and if that doesn’t work, the implication from the system is that it will then elevate it to a customer service rep. The issue with that is when you do that, a hard reset and reinstall, the record with “Finn” also seems to go with it, so the system will never engage a human, it comes across almost like it’s intentional firewall in their service. I am coming up on my 1 year membership renewal. I am at the point where I need to decide if I need to make the $72 annual investment again. I would gladly spend that again, but I’m not really looking at a $72 investment. Given my current ring performance, this means buying another ring. Between the membership and a new ring, with taxes, shipping, etc, etc, etc that’s a near $500 investment; and since it only made it 10 months, that really means it’s effectively closer to $600 a year. Battery powered wearables have a limited life; I went into this understanding that, but, I don’t think that after less than a year of usage, going from ~5 days of battery life and collecting non-stop data to less than 24 hours of life with random crashes is in any way acceptable. Apple or Garmin or Google would have mass recalls or replacements on their hands if their wearables behaved like this. Good health is priceless. The ring helped me tremendously in my fitness journey. I have lost over 65 lbs with its help. At this point, however, given I have hit and am maintaining my weight goal, and from my current experience as well as based on what I read from others online, I refuse to spend any more money with Oura, simply because of their poor customer service and poor product life. My final thoughts: the ring makes your fitness journey significantly easier. Data is king when you’re committed to self improvement. For that, I give it 5 stars; but if you buy one, understand that it most likely will not make it to a year without some sort of collection or battery issue. You have to decide for yourself if $500 for 10-ish months of data is a fair price to pay.