Here’s a curveball for you: Withings, which is an excellent fitness-based electronics company with all kinds of fun products like trackers and smart scales, has just bested all the smartwatch makers out there with the new Activité watch.
At first glance, it looks like any other old analog watch. It has a clean white face, a leather band, and all the class and glamour of a night at the Oscars. But it’s much smarter than it looks.
The Activité was designed in Paris and made in Switzerland, and comes with enough sensors to measure distance covered (either walking, running, or swimming), sleep quality, and calories burned throughout the day.
As it has a traditional analog face, these stats need to be seen through the complementary Health Mate app from Withings, which already exists for other Withings products, meaning you can have a full suite of sensors at any given moment looking after your health.
As you may have guessed, the new Withings watch can tell the time and automatically switch time zones based on where you are.
But I haven’t gotten to the best part yet: The battery lasts a year.
Up until now, the only player to compete on that level is the Garmin VivoFit, which is a clunky little son of a gun.
The new Withings Activité watch will be available in two colors starting this fall for $390.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/24/withings-new-smartwatch-looks-good-playing-dumb/?utm_campaign=fb&ncid=fb