We had the Withings Activité Pop in the office recently, courtesy of tech toy shopping website GadgitechMe.com, and here are our thoughts.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with this brand, Withings is a French consumer electronics company that has been around for about six years. The company specialises in products and apps that help promote a healthy lifestyle.
What catapulted the brand into the limelight with a guaranteed spot on the fitness wearable stage was the Activité – a beautiful timepiece and a fitness tracker that works on a CR2025 button cell with a battery life of up to eight months.
Back to the Pop. Similar tech’s found in the Activité Pop, an affordable and colourful option to the Activité. My first thought using this device was that, while other brand’s wearables double as watches, with Withings it’s the watch that doubles as a wearable.
The Activité Pop is an extremely light and comfortable device that features a silicone watch strap. It’s more watch than fitness wearable, until you interact with Withings’ Health Mate app.
The watch features activity tracking and automatically senses when you’re walking or running, while the app offers the entire selection of fitness stats such as your steps, distance, calories, etc. Similar to several fitness wearables out there, this one is water-resistant, and after a hard day of being active and fit, like me (LOL that’s not true), the watch tracks your sleep and can wake you up with a silent alarm.
The app is surprisingly comprehensive, with detailed analytics, stats and graphs of your activities — or in my case, lack thereof. The latest software update, at the time of writing, of the Withings Health Mate app had a few glitches with its synchronisation. Hopefully future versions will sort this out.
This device was made for those who once swore they would never buy a wearable — be it a fitness tracker or a smartwatch — but are secretly suffering from a severe bout of wearable FOMO. Or those people who just appreciate a beautifully crafted timepiece that — oh hey — is a fitness tracker as well. And one you don’t have to charge every single day.
