Withings expands fitness family with button-sized, e-ink Go tracker

Withings is known for its elegant line of products as well as their typically high price tags. In an effort to appeal to the masses, the company debuted the baby of its fitness tracker family at CES 2016: the Withings Go. The coin-sized device promises to automatically track your activity and sleep, show your progress on its e-ink display, and be so small and light that you might end up misplacing it somewhere.

If you've been shopping around for fitness trackers at all, you'll immediately notice the Withings Go's resemblance to devices like the Jawbone Up Move and the Fitbit Zip. It's a small disk that can fit into a wristband or a clip carrier so you can wear it in different ways. Jawbone's Up Move as well as the Misfit Flash use LEDs to indicate settings and time rather than full displays, but the Withings Go uses an e-ink display that covers one side of the disk. It uses a dial to show your activity goal progress for the day, and the same bar can change to show the time. While we haven't seen how this will look on the device yet, it seems like it would be a better substitute for a watch than other LED-equipped devices since those tend to tell time with nuanced blinking lights.

Like other Withings trackers, the Go monitors activity and sleep automatically and will recognize when you're walking around your home or running around the block. It's water resistant up to 5ATM, or up to 50 meters, meaning you can swim with it as well. Withings has always included swim tracking in its devices, and the Go doesn't deviate from this as it recognizes swim strokes automatically. When the device senses you're completing vigorous activity, it will monitor distance, calories, and duration without the need for any interaction from you; all of that information is then shared with the Withings Health Mate app for Android and iOS. You won't even have to worry about charging the device regularly, as it's powered by a removable button cell battery which will last at least eight months.

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