Thoughts on the Withings Scanwatch 2

It’s the end of 2023 and eye contact is dead. In what is the height of rudeness, I now look at people’s wrists when I meet them. The most common sight in my terrible lower-arm based greeting system? An Apple Watch. I occasionally use it as a way to make small talk: ‘how many steps have you done?’ ‘Have you stood enough today?’ In such dystopian interactions, the repsonse that stopped me most in my tracks was ‘hold on, I’ve got an alert for arterial fibrillation’. Unfortunately, what I really want to say in these exchanges is: ‘it looks crap, doesn’t it?’ As Apple faces a patent dispute that has already forced the company to pause (albeit temporarily) sales of the Series 9 and Ultra versions of the Watch in the United States, I wonder if it’s time to reassess wrist-based tracking devices?

There’s no knocking the success of the Apple Watch. I’m not alone in having owned several over the years. While Apple doesn’t reveal sales figures for the Watch, one analyst in 2020 estimated that Apple had sold over one hundred and thirty million watches since its launch in 2015. It’s 2023 now so that figure will be much higher, naturally. It’s not just advertising spin that has contributed to the success of the Watch. The Watch is a serious fete of engineering and miniaturisation. Unfortunately, I cannot get over one of the main complaints from its launch in 2015: it doesn’t look very good. I understand that taste is subjective and based on myriad factors but it’s hard to deny that a classic automatic watch usually looks more appealing that a square mounted on a…