Ultrahuman Ring Air Review: A Subscription-Free Smart Ring
The Ring Air makes suggestions based on your circadian rhythm and time of day. Get sunlight in the morning, wait until stimulants Adenosine is gone, and remember to stop drinking coffee towards the end of the day. It also uses the drop in heart rate as an indicator of recovery (if your heart rate drops earlier in the night, you recover better) and suggests reasons why it may not have dropped as quickly, such as: B. Meals too close to bedtime or alcohol. This is all common sense stuff, and there’s a whole lot of unnecessary jargon, although simpler language would suffice, but it helps to get some ideas throughout the day.
The app may feel complex at first, but look at the elements it tracks or extrapolates and you’ll find an explanation as to why this metric is important and what it tells you. Color coding helps with this: green indicates a measurement is within your target range, and red highlights potential problems.
Ultrahuman also creates a weekly trends report to highlight where you have improved and what still needs improvement. Stats junkies will love this, but it might be overwhelming if you prefer a simple overview. There’s also a tab with meditations, workouts, and sleep stories. There is quite a bit of content and the production values are good.
Unfortunately, one tab in the app is just an advertisement for Ultrahuman’s M1 glucose monitoring patch. The app has been updated several times since I started testing, so it just keeps getting better. But I think event logging is cumbersome. In addition to recording workouts, you can also retrospectively log activities or sleep, log what you eat, and enter your weight. For anything else you want to include, there’s an “Other” category. But the app could integrate all this data better.
Most fitness trackers allow you to set goals or adjust them to fit your lifestyle. However, this option is missing from the Ultrahuman Ring Air. It can be a little discouraging to constantly miss targets, and Ultrahuman’s insistence that I complete 11,000 steps every day is unrealistic for me, so I hope they allow for some optimizations in the future .
Ring my bell
Photo: Ultrahuman
Overall, I’m a fan of the Ultrahuman Ring Air. It’s nice to have such a sleek device that monitors my health. I find the reminders really useful. The Ultrahuman team also seems to be adding features at a steady pace. When I had an issue, in-app support was quick and helpful. (I switched from an Android phone to my iPhone, but it refused to sync. I had to delete and reinstall the app to get it to work.)
Battery life is solid. Ultrahuman recommends up to six days, but four days is more realistic. The app will prompt you to charge when the battery reaches around 20 percent. A small charging station and a USB-C cable are included, but you will need your own power adapter. It takes more than two hours to fully charge the Ring Air. That’s enough time for me to forget about it, and I lost a few nights of data because of it.
The obvious alternative is the Oura. It offers a more polished and accessible experience, as well as far more user-friendly workout tracking, but Oura has a significant lead over Ultrahuman, and the fact that you don’t need a subscription for Ring Air is a big plus. It takes a few weeks to gain valuable insights, but with enough data, trends can be identified to help you identify possible reasons for poor sleep or your willingness to exercise. I can’t say I feel like an Ultrahuman yet, but the Ring Air is getting me in the right direction.
