Withings Activité declares it’s time for smartwatch to be subtle

The new Withings smartwatch hides some impressive and useful features behind a conventional, real clock face.

The push to embrace the smartwatch revolution may be too overwhelming for some. They may prefer to dip their toes into the sea of connected technology rather than risk full app-based body immersion.

For them, there’s Withings Activité, a stylish, smallish Swiss-made wristwatch with an uncomplicated watch face. It doesn’t have a LED screen, so your first question would be: “where are the smarts?”

The first giveaway is the lack of a crown as you set up the watch using the Withings Health Mate app available for iOS. The watch and app connect with Bluetooth 4.0. There’s a rotating dial in the app that eerily rotates the watch hands on an Activité sitting beside it during the calibration process. It takes the time from your phone.

What appears to be a seconds hand is actually a steps dial, as the Activité quietly counts them.

The dial indicates how many steps you have traversed. But to get the exact figure, you head to the Health Mate app, which also calculates calories burned and distance. Like other activity monitor apps, Health Mate throws up a bar chart of daily steps and you can select a day and drill down to view movement hour by hour.

The same applies to sleep, which it monitors automatically. It shows deep sleep, light sleep, time awake at different periods of the night. And you can set a silent, vibrating alarm to wake you up.

The Activité is one up on many rivals, being water resistant to five atmospheres so you can take it swimming. Withings says automatic recognition of swimming is due in a firmware upgrade in April. You replace the standard leather strap with a silicone water resistant one that’s in the box.

Sure, this watch does not have apps or the functionality of Android smartwatches, or Apple Watch, but it combines the functions of a watch and activity monitor elegantly. It’s like wearing a classic timepiece and a Jawbone Up, or basic Fitbit model, rolled into one.

You get a more complete health picture if you have other Withings devices.

Last year I bought a Withings Smart Body Analyser — one of my best purchases of connected home devices. It’s a set of WiFi-connected bathroom scales that also measure heart rate, body mass index, and even your bathroom’s CO2 level. These are automatically recorded in the app, too. The upshot is I now have eight months of weight and BMI data that the app also presents graphically.

Withings also sells a heart rate monitor, blood pressure and dedicated app tracking system, so you can end up with a complete snapshot of your health through the app.

Health Mate also syncs with some well-established apps such as RunKeeper, Nike+, MyFitnessPal and BodyMedia FIT. (Rather controversially, the FIT armband purports to track not only calories burned but those consumed.)

One notable benefit: you don’t have to charge the Activité at night: it uses a standard cr2025 battery and Garmin claims eight months of battery life.

In the end, this little watch may seem limited in functions, but offers a respectable serving of activity tracking data.

But it costs. You’ll shell out $US450, almost $580 plus postage buying it online through outlets such as Amazon.

If that’s too much, there’s always its little sibling, the cheaper but not quite as chic Activité Pop.

Rating: 7.5/10
Price: $580-plus