It’s 2017 folks. Health is the new black. While we’ve come all this way with improving our health in recent years with education and fitness, technology is still lagging a bit behind.
As someone who is submerged in the tech world, data is one my favorite words. Tracking data in all aspects of life helps us improve: our balance at the bank, our weight at the end of the month and everything in between.
Introducing Withings, part of Nokia. An awesome digital health company that has a few products to take care of all the tracking needs you fitness lovers and data-users would need in terms of your health.
Table of Contents
#1 Withings Steel
Style
Before talking about the actual performance, let’s take a look at how it looks. Most other smart watches have horrendous designs, making wearing them very un-cool (as the kids would say). Not Withings, which comes in several styles (Pop, Steel and Sapphire) which all look amazing. The minimalist design sports a stainless steel case and chrome hands keeping it simple and uncluttered. Another interesting choice is the lack of buttons on the watch. It has your basic analog clock and another gear showing you your activity level, from 0-100%. The rest is on the app, which we’ll cover later. Let’s not mention colors, which it has a lot to choose from. Basically looks like your ordinary stylish watch, not a geeky looking smart watch.
The Basics
Now let’s get to the sweet parts. The watch tracks your physical activity 24/7. That means sleep, workouts, day-to-day activities, everything pretty much. It’s water resistant, so you don’t need to remove it in the shower or pool, which is one of the aspects that made previous smart watches problematic.
Data
What can it tell you?
- Steps + Distance – how active you are in a single day.
- Calories Burnt during the day (including in workouts) to help you eat the right amounts. Even has auto-sync with MyFitnessPal, which I actually use.
- Workout Summary – be it swimming or jogging, it knows what you’re doing and takes everything into consideration properly.
- Sleep – How long it takes for you to fall asleep, duration of sleep, sleep cycles (light vs deep sleep) and sleep interruptions (very important as you get older)
App Sync
The watch syncs automatically with any iPhone (iOS 7+) or Android (4.3+) and displays all the insights in an app, to keep the watch uncluttered. Best of all, there’s no charging! The device, which uses an advanced Bluetooth Low Energy protocol lasts 8 months, and after that you can just replace the battery with any standard watch battery. No need to charge every day. I had to double check this twice just to make sure, but it’s true. Yay!
Can’t wait to try it out.
Purchase on Withings.com for $149.95
#2 Withings Body Cardio Scale
Another product we wanted to talk about is the body scale. This product, which works together with the Withings Watch above, helps you track your ac
tual progress in terms of weight loss and fat %, which is the actual point of getting healthier.
The Basics
It’s a body scale, but not your everyday scale. It’s a scale on steroids. It works via Wifi, so once you step on all the data measured is transferred to your app (the same one you have tracking your watch data). No more manual logging on Excel sheets.
Design
Clean and simple, just what Withings does best. It’s very thin, around 0.7 inches. Works on all floor types and can be easily stored.
What it tracks
- Weight – duh. Keeps track of actual mass.
- Fat + muscle mass, or fat % is one of the most important metrics (to me it’s much more relevant than weight)
- Water mass + bone mass – to get a full picture on your body
All of this is tracked via the app automatically, so you have nice graphs documenting your journey.
Can’t wait to try this one as well!
Purchase on Withings.com for $179.95
Coupon: For use on Withings.com: WITH-HEALTH-V0DAVR — 20% off your entire order with at least one device in cart. Good until 3/1/17