When it comes to smartwatches, the Apple Watch has ruled the roost since its release. The format is simple – a digital watch with sensors that can track all kinds of health and wellbeing statistics from your blood oxygen level, to how long you spend in deep sleep.
It's been a massive success, but it's far from the only wearable technology to exist. Devices like the Whoop 4.0 and the Amazon Halo took a similar wrist-based approach, but removed the screen. Others, like Oura, use a ring to collect data, which you can view in an app on your phone.
I'm personally a massive fan of other kinds of wearable technology. My Apple Watch SE is brilliant for tracking health and lifestyle data. But as a fan of traditional watches, I either have to give up on tracking that data, or face the fashion faux pas of wearing two watches at once. For me, then, any other kind of wearable is a home run.
Today, Oura announced a new app for the Apple Watch. The new integration is described as "a mirror of Oura's iPhone app", bringing all of the data from the ring to your wrist. Complications can be added to watch faces to denote the different scores the Oura ring gives you.
All of which sounds great. I'm all for better integration of different devices, and certainly champion cross-device compatibility which sounds as simple as this.
I just can't quite see who this is aimed at. The Oura ring certainly puts a different spin on things – the brand combines data into a handful of scores for different things, like sleep and readiness – but the underlying data collected on the ring and the Apple Watch is broadly the same.
Even the most fitness fanatic people I know don't double down on trackers, which makes the whole collaboration feel a little redundant. Now, if the Oura ring's trackers could take the strain from an Apple Watch to extend battery life? Well, that would be another story...
