I have a Withings ScanWatch that is now five yeras old. The hardware is amazing. So is the battery life (15-20 days on a single charge). But they simply cannot do software. The Withings App is full of bugs and started to aggressively push the subscription years ago.
But when there is an update, there is hope for improvement. But the last update blew me away. They update the list of activities, which is probably getting close to 100. It now includes odd things like:
- Australian Rules Football (surely different from all the other Football versions)
- Dog Walking (okay, maybe more exhausting than regular walking. But what about the breed…?)
- Pushing a Stroller (Maybe an insistent parent demanded that one?)
- Pushing a wheelchair at a regular pace (okay, let’s be inclusive)
- Pushing a wheelchair at a faster pace (now you are getting ridiculous)
- Sauna (does it withstand the heat?)
But they still do not have what I regular use for exercising, Inline Skating. To be fair, they just added Roller Skating, which I will have to try out.
So: What’s the difference? For instance, whether GPS tracking is on or off, or whether speed is measured in km/h, m/s, minutes/km, or something so strange I cannot think of it. There is probably also a formula that computes calories consumed.
What would make me happy
What I would like: Simply give me the option to make my own sports entry: I provide the name and configure the parameters. There cannot be more than a handful.
But that’s probably too much to ask for. I once wanted to find out how many kilometers I had skated in a year. Withings does not provide this statistic, so I simply downloaded the data. What. A. Mess. It was a ZIP file with a fairly large number JSON files. I eventually found the right one. But the format was cryptic. I guess it was a set of GPS coordinates with time stamps and other information. So to compute the distance, I would have to compute the segments and add them all up. I gave up, life is too short.
The hardware is great, but my next smartwatch will be a Garmin, once this one breaks.
