For the greater part of this past summer, I wore six smart rings at once. I wanted to see which was best, and the Oura Ring Gen 3 was the clear winner. Well, it’s been about two weeks since my experiment ended, and there’s now a new winner: the Oura Ring 4.

The big deal isn’t the sensors but how they can keep track of your vitals. One of the biggest updates to the Oura Ring 4 is the new Smart Sensing platform. Now boasting 18 signal pathways—more than double the eight pathways the Gen 3 used—the Ring 4 promises greater accuracy, even if the ring rotates up to 30% on your finger.

Smart rings are a fast-growing faction of the fitness tracker industry, and one company can be largely credited with putting these discreet wearables on the map: Oura. So, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the brand's Oura Ring 4 is the best smart ring you can buy.

Is this still the best smart ring in town, or should you look elsewhere? Oura's got a new smart ring out. Let's talk about it. The release of the Oura Ring 4 brings the next generation of Oura's popular wearable to the market.

The Oura Ring 4 is great, but if you've already got an Oura Ring Gen 3, you're probably safe to sit this upgrade out

Its best new features — including, finally, workable automatic activity detection — are coming to the last-gen Oura Ring, too, via software updates. But that Oura Ring Gen 3 owners won't feel pressured to upgrade hardly seems like a downside to me.