I so wanted to love this watch. Yet try as I might I could not make it work the way I hoped. I came to Withings from using a Garmin Vivomove HR and wanted some of the extra features this watch provides.
Let me start with the good. Right out of the box this watch is impressive. It is well constructed, made of solid materials, and has a great look to it. The watch itself is constructed of steel and has some decent weight to it. (More on that later). The watch face has an impressive glass face that is not easily scratched. The watch has a button to the right of it like watches of old where you set the time or wound the watch. This button is pushed to access the watch settings. You have to download the Withings App on your phone to connect with the watch but you can also access the settings directly from the watch to set it up as well. The watch comes with a USB-C to USB-A chord that plugs into the charging port that comes with the watch. Setup of the watch was pretty simple. Connected easily to my phone via the Withings app.
The watch face itself is very elegant. It has a circular area on top where the digital data is shown, and there is another circular area to the bottom where the your daily step tracking is shown via a mechanical dial. The hour and minute hands glow in the dark at night which makes it very easy to see the time on the watch while in bed without having to press anything.
The watch is comfortable to wear around the wrist. But this is where the problems start. That button on the right side of the watch can easily be depressed if you wear it too close to your hand. Withings FAQ for this watch suggest wearing the watch 1 to 2 finger widths above your wrist bone. This is totally unnatural for me and my first major complaint about this watch. Even with this placement, that button still gets depressed and causes issues with the clock hands tracking. I was finding a need every couple of days to readjust the hands so they were showing the correct time. On top of this, my forearm is thicker with this placement and the watch tends to want to creep down to the wrist unless I make it uncomfortably tight around my forearm.
I’ve seen online some people mention switching the watch to the right hand alleviated some of the problems regarding the control button getting depressed. I’m 60 years old now and have been wearing my watch on my left hand all my life. Wasn’t going to switch now. Besides, I had so many more issues with this watch.
If this was my only problem with the watch I might have kept it. But I found numerous other issues.
Activity tracking: C –
This watch does a good job tracking when I walk or run fairly well with regards to when I start and stop. But that's about all it does really well. In order for the watch to track using GPS, you have to start the workout either on the phone or the watch. Pretty much this is the case with any phones that have Android 13 or higher. The watch will not track GPS automatically when it detects an activity has started. Also, it only tracks heart rate during running. Does not track heart rate during a walk no matter how strenuous the walk is.
GPS Tracking: F
The watch doesn’t have GPS tracking built in. It uses GPS data from the phone. For years I have been using a GPS tracker for all my runs. It tracks every run completely no matter where I’ve been in the world. For some reason, the GPS data from the phone to the watch becomes inaccurate or doesn’t track at all even when I turn the activity tracking on manually via the watch or the phone. For some reason, it only consistently seems to track elevation. When I tracked with the running app on my phone and used the watch, sometimes there would be missing data only with Withings. The fact that I have to turn the tracking on manually for each run is hugely annoying.
Heart Rate Tracking: F
For some reason during running activity, this watch either stops tracking the heart rate completely or it registers a heart rate way lower than it should be. Contacting Withings customer support they mention setting the watch higher above the wrist bone. I do this but the weight of the watch during the run tends to make it slide naturally back to the wrist area. I've tried making the watch so tight it won't move but this makes wearing the watch very uncomfortable. Even in this position, I still encounter the same problem with the heart rate tracking. I included pictures of the indentation left in my arm from wearing the watch so tight. The main reason I buy these activity trackers is to track my heart rate. The watch some days would have my heart rate at 84 bpm while running up a half mile stretch of hill at 6500 ft elevation. I wish my heart worked that efficiently. Other times there would just be a dotted line at a much lower rate. It’s winter here now and it seems the watch has issues tracking in colder weather. Even if I had good layers and the watch firmly in place it would just become inaccurate. On warmer days, the accuracy was much better.
Step Tracking: D
I have been tracking steps for over 10 years now. I first did it by counting out actual steps in locations where I work. I have halls around my building that one round is almost exactly a quarter of a mile and takes me around 500 steps to complete. Sometimes this tracks spot on, other times it can track as many as 20% less! In fact, I found most days I was 10-20% lower in my step counts when doing my normal routines. I do so many steps in a day I could probably live with this. But just before getting ready to return the watch I noticed something strange in the Withings app. If I looked at the watch and checked my step count, I would have a certain number on the watch. If I forced the Withings app to update the count on my phone, for almost a second, I would see the number adjust on the app to equal the step count on my watch, then the page would do a refresh and the number of steps would drop! Upon checking my phone, it now matched the lower step count on my phone. Steps would actually disappear. Not sure what is causing this but it is more than frustrating to say the least.
Mileage: A
The watch and the phone would seem to track mileage pretty well. Even if GPS tracking wasn’t engaged for an activity, the mileage seemed to be fairly accurate knowing the routes I’ve always taken in the past. In fact, there would be days where the app and watch said I did 9 miles of distance but the steps for walking those 9 miles was only 14,000 steps. I’m 5’9” and I typically do the average of 2000 steps per mile. Only if I run that mileage would I tend to be that much lower. Again, the step tracking here was off.
Sleep Tracking: B
Most wearable activity trackers have poor sleep tracking. I’m not complaining much about how the watch did it here. It was fairly accurate with regards to knowing when I went to sleep and when I actually woke up. Seem to know if I was just lying in bed awake. It would track REM, Deep and light sleep as well but have no way to know how accurate it was. No issues there. My only problem was that if I got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, the app took this as me waking up. If I went back to bed, the app would then track the additional sleep but when it synced with Health Connect, it would only report the first part of my sleep. So Health Connect always thought I got less sleep than I actually did. No big deal for me.
Pulse Ox (SpO2): A
This seemed to be fairly accurate. Have a pulse ox monitor for my finger and the watch was a little bit higher most of the time. I live at high altitude and when I would travel to lower altitude the watch would show that my night time pulse Ox was higher at sea level which I expected.
Breathing: Pass
I really have no good way to verify the accuracy here.
ECG: A+
I have had issues with my heart rate in the past which is why heart rate tracking is so important to me. I have multiple devices that I can use to track my ECG and the data from this watch was almost exact to those other devices in every way. You have to activate this tracking and hold the watch and it seemed to perform flawlessly.
Withings App: F
When I first got the watch and loaded the Withings app on the phone, I could get the data from the watch to the phone no problem. But for some reason, I could not get the data from the Withings app to sync with Health Connect. The Withings app could read my historical data and also upload into the app which I really liked but I could only get partial data updated from the Withings app to Health Connect. It would get mileage, and activities loaded, but step count was left out completely. After many discussions with customer support an update finally came out to the app where step counts at least started syncing.
Withings Customer Support: D
I will say this about their customer support. If you have minor issues, they are very responsive and very helpful. Their first level support responds very quickly. But if you have an issue that needs to go to higher level. Here you enter a black hole. I never heard back from the higher level of customer support even though I was referred there multiple times. And when your ticket gets passed to that level, the first level will no longer respond to you unless you open a new trouble ticket with a different problem. Never received responses to my inquiries after something got elevated.
Battery Life: D
This watch is advertised with a long battery life. I found it would drop under 20% battery after only 7 days with notifications to the watch turned completely off and only using its tracking ability. This wasn't much better than my Garmin Vivomove HR which lasted about 5 days under the same conditions.
I suspect the watch I received was a lemon and needed to be replaced. Luckily, I bought during Black Friday and had an extended period where I could test the watch and try to work with Withings to get help. I probably should have tried to return it immediately when I received it but customer support from Withings was not helpful in that regard. I decided to just move on for now and go back to my old Garmin watch until the next time I find time to try an upgrade again.
