Fitness trackers that hang off your wrist are useful for accurate step counting, but if you also like to wear a watch, they can get in the way. Every bit as accurate and significantly more convenient is a clip-on tracker that you can hook around a belt loop or bra strap. The only problem? Most don’t really tell you how you’re doing with your fitness goals. The Withings Go is a small, clip-on fitness tracker that’ll show your daily step progress, and double as an analog watch, with an 88-segment always-on circular e-ink display.
Like the Jawbone Up Move with which it shares a lot of characteristics, the Withings Go can be worn on a wrist, but it’s really made to be discreetly clipped onto an item of clothing. A pocket actually makes a lot of sense to clip the Go too, because its circular face is built around a segmented, persistent electronic ink display that can be tapped to get an update on your goals, and that can also function as an analog fob-watch.
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Using that efficient e-ink display, the Withings Go promises eight months of continuous battery life from a single CR2032 button cell battery — like the Jawbone Up Move and Fitbit Zip — that can be easily replaced. It’ll connect to your Android or iOS smartphone and Withings’ Health Mate app for all the usual quantified self tracking and stat monitoring, also with food logging through MyFitnessPal integration.
The Go will also track movement in a pool while you’re swimming, and it’ll automatically detect the water, being water-resistant down to five atmospheres. It won’t track the number of strokes you’re taking as you flail about where no human should dare to set foot, but it’ll keep a measure of the time you spent doing it and estimate the overall caloric burn of the exercise.
Withings will be selling the Go internationally for $US69.99 before April this year, although there’s no word yet whether the fitness-tracking puck or its Activite counterparts will be made more widely available in Australia. [Withings]