Living with a Nokia Watch

Meet Nokia Health, a new brand and proud owners of the Withings company. Withings was a small company that got into the health space, making watches, weight scales and more. When Nokia Health acquired them it was only a matter of time before their products hit the mass market and made their way into our lives.

We’ve been testing the Nokia Health Steel. It is a smart watch but not as you know it. It has no digital displays, no touchscreen, no buttons and the battery doesn’t die after five days. It looks like a normal watch actually. So what’s so smart about it?

The Steel has an eight month battery life. EIGHT. It connects to your phone via bluetooth and using the Health Mate app you can set the time, set your target step goal, set a silent alarm and even start a health programme.

The watch face has a normal analog face with a minutes and hours hand, it also has a smaller dial for 0-100% to measure the progress of your goal at a glance. It won’t alert you when you get an email, when someone likes your status or when you’ve had a match on Tinder. It is a non intrusive watch that allows you to just get on with your day rather than be a screen extension of your phone. The watch face is 35mm so some might find it small on their wrists, this is one you’d want to try on before buying. The wristband is made from silicone which looks fine but feels a little cheap, it would look better in a leather band really.

The data that the little watch captures is sleep and steps, no heart-rate monitoring and no buttons to trigger a workout. It does a good job of accurate step and sleep measurement and if you’re going to be simple then doing it well is important. The vibrating silent alarm works with your sleep rhythm so it will wake you as close to your alarm time as possible at the end of a sleep cycle.

On the app itself you’ll see detailed data around your movement and sleep but you’ll be able to integrate other devices and apps into it. MyFitnessPal is tightly connected, the Nokia Health Body scale will send data into the app and you can manually log your other exercises. With all of the data in this app Nokia Health has built programs that you can launch which are actually really smart. The app will look at all your data, assess it against your goals and put an eight week plan together tailored for you.

Calling the Nokia Health Steel a smart watch seems wrong, that would place it into a category filled with wrist worn phones. This is a subtle accessory, will look fine when you’re wearing a suit and will also do the job to track your day and your night. Building the Nokia Health ecosystem with the scale is a good combo and will help you track your whole body with ease.

You’ll find the Nokia Health Steel in stores now for around $187 (shop around for a good deal!)