the smart health connected watch Review

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The French startup hit hard at CES with the announcement of its new smart health connected watch / activity sensor: the Withings Activity Pop. After several weeks of use, here is my Review of this newcomer to the market.

Design and Hardware

By offering Pop to, Withings has chosen to sacrifice materials. A classic glass instead of sapphire, a silicone strap instead of leather and a PVD metal finish rather than stainless steel. Warning the metal outline is very sensitive to scratches, I noticed this when my arm brushed against a wall.

Available in blue, sand or black, it will soon be possible to have access to new bracelets to vary the colors. For my part, I chose the blue model to match my favorite site: Stuffi.com. The 3.6cm dial is perfect for small wrists, unlike a lot of smartwatches or smart health connected bracelets on the market, like the Moto 360 or the Fitbit Charge HR which I am also testing.

The silicone strap is very (too?) Flexible, which is comfortable to wear, but not very practical to put on. In the watch are embedded motion sensors and a 3-axis accelerometer. A vibrator, useful for waking up, is also there. The strap changing system is incredibly practical, as you can see in the photo below.

Finally, and these are the two main advantages of the Withings Activity Pop: it is waterproof and its battery (a round battery) promises an autonomy of 8 months (I'll keep you posted in August!).

Installation

For the moment the Pop Activity is only compatible with iOS (7 and +). The update of the application, announced for the end of the month, must allow Android compatibility. Unlike other products like Fitbit's, you need to use Health Mate (the Withings app) to set up your watch, so forget about the computer. I use an iPhone, so no worries, but a friend of mine had a bad surprise with their Sony Xperia Z3, it will be necessary to wait until the end of the month before they can use their Pop Activity.

Then everything is very simple: you download the application in the App Store, create your account and click on "add a device". From there, the app guides you step by step through the setup process.

Update: the watch is now fully compatible with Android!

features

The Withings Pop has a goal: track your daily physical activity. The choice of the brand was to make the sensor as invisible as possible, so that we only think about it when necessary. I have been an advocate of this idea since I started using smart health connected objects, because nothing annoys me more than having to press a button to track my sleep or synchronize. The sensor must be present, but not intrusive, and this is really the case for the Pop Activity.

The watch tracks your steps for the day and will deduce a distance traveled as well as the calories burned. If you don't have the app on hand, the small pointer on the dial tells you your level of progress according to the step goal you have set.

Sleep tracking is also part of it, and everything here is automatic, no need to put the watch in mode by tapping on it, the next morning it will have detected your sleep time, waking time, cycles (light or deep) and waking times. You will also know the number of hours spent in bed and the overall sleep time.

You can also set a (single) alarm, which will vibrate the watch 12 times in the morning. You can see the hands of the watch indicate your alarm time by tapping twice on the glass after immobilizing the watch for 5 seconds.

Interesting feature for travelers: if you change the time zone of your phone, the watch follows automatically. My phone ended up being set to American West Coast time to amuse my friends with this feature, so I haven't really used it yet.

Application

No surprise there, I'm already used to Health Mate as a user of the (excellent) smart body analyzer from Withings. For those who do not know, all the information of your smart health connected objects and services is centralized on the same timeline.

The application allows you to set your alarm clock, the system in place is not very practical. Then you will find your activity data with steps, goal fill rate, distance, calories, and sessions. These are also automatically detected and whether it is walking or running, this function works very well. Swimming should follow in a future update.

You also find the sleep data with the time spent in bed, the sleep time and the breakdown between light, deep sleep and wakefulness. This feature is really appreciated, for its automatic side. The data also seem very reliable.

The Withings Activity Pop being in its infancy, the watch's firmware is a bit slow for my taste when it comes to synchronization. You have to wait a good minute to see your data displayed. This slight concern will certainly be resolved by firmware and / or application updates.

My opinion

From the CES, this Pop Activity made a very strong impression on me. And this has been confirmed: a quality design, very sober, and very consistent data. All for a relatively low price in the end compared to classic watches. Autonomy and tightness are clearly a plus. On the negative level, some fickle features like synchronization and double tap to display the alarm clock. Some users have problems with glass, which I do not have.

Withings goes, in my opinion, in the right direction of what should become of the quantified self: almost invisible sensors that integrate easily into our daily lives.

Do not hesitate to ask me your questions in the comments, I will be happy to answer them!

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AB SMART HEALTH REVIEW