Count me among the one-third of users who ditch their fitness tracker within the first few months. Every model I've tried needed to be to charged regularly, the matte gray or black casing ruined any attempt at looking clean and natty, and, especially with the light up models, wearing one usually drew the wrong kind of attention. Fitbits and the Jawbone UP let the world know, like a to-go cup of kale juice or a Crossfit t-shirt, that you take your body very seriously.

Then came the Withings Activité, a gorgeous timepiece with Braun-like numbers and a leather band. The genius of the design, though, was a subtle secondary dial that read the steps being counted by the internal accelerometers. Sync it with the Withings app (iOS only for now, Android in February) via low-energy Bluetooth, and you get an x-y graph showing your progress that day and all days before. No altimeter, no heart-rate monitor, no GPS—just the data you needed to, in moments of weakness, take the stairs instead of the elevator. The Withings Activité Pop was, on some days, ten or 20 steps above or below the count from my control Fitbit and Breeze app, but those inaccuracies were never significant enough to make you feel cheated, especially since the motivation was always there.

Most importantly, the Activité's conservative energy consumption allows it to run on a standard watch battery (CR2025, $2 or so each) for about 8 months, which means you can treat it like a normal watch, wear it when you wanted to, and not lose a day of progress when you forgot to recharge it. In contrast, most Android Wear watches, like the LG G Watch R I've tested, last no more than two days. The Apple Watch is rumored to require a recharge every night. That means those watches spend a lot of time off your wrist, attached to a dock.

Problem is $450 was more than I could afford for a watch, and more than I could advise readers to spend on something like this. No, it's not expensive in the world of analog watches, but Fitbit and Jawbone have conditioned us to expect to spend no more than $150 on a fitness tracker.

Then, like a shining beacon of restraint among the excess of CES, Withings revealed the Activité Pop, a $150 version of the Activité. For the price cut, the watch is built in China, not Switzerland, cheaper, more fragile mineral glass replaces scratch-proof sapphire glass. The Activité's leather strap becomes with a silicone variant, and the stainless steel is, instead, coated metal. No matter: the strap is comfortable and stays in place, and the 1.3-ounce weight gives it appropriate heft. It looks and feels more expensive than it is, though the color choices (blue, gray, and taupe) give a slight Swatch vibe.

Functionally, all the genius of the original $450 Activité remains. Setup involves a Bluetooth sync, a quick calibration of the hands, and the quartz movement keeps time. When I landed in New York and took my phone out of Airplane Mode and turned on Bluetooth, the Pop automatically changed time zones. Set your daily step goal in the app, and the gauge moves according to your progress. Ignore the app all day and just give the watch an occasional glance to get motivated. When you hit your step goal, the hands dance in celebration and the body vibrates. Before bed, sync up, and you get a satisfying readout of your movements throughout the day and see how you're doing through the weeks and months you've been wearing it.

Sleep tracking (movement readings translated into light and deep sleep cycles) turns on automatically, so no need to press buttons before nodding off. The Pop can also work as a silent alarm: set it, and it'll vibrate like a phone at the time you set – one annoying bit is that there's no way to silence it, you just wait until its ten vibrations are over.

Those are helpful features, but I never wore it to sleep. The silicone band got hot, and the 1/2-inch-thick face was distracting while trying to sleep—an admittedly personal complaint. You can even wear it in the pool to track your swimming (also automatic), but even the 165 feet of water resistance couldn't bring me to take it in the Atlantic Ocean while surfing—side note: no watch can claim to be "waterproof" because at a certain pressure, they all break, so the word "water resistant" gets used with a depth rating.

This watch has the vibe of a proper, gentlemanly timepiece, with a mid-century artistic vibe, but it'll hold up to almost any abuse. Almost any.

My tester met its end when a millimeter-wide scratch in the glass, incurred while carrying a mattress up narrow stairs, spider-cracked to the rest of the face, chipping off the mineral glass and making the piece operational, but compromising its aesthetics and waterproofing.

Most $150 devices that come through our office don't warrant mourning upon return to the manufacturer, or deliberate breakdown in the name of research, but I was bummed to lose this thing. Having spent time with the Moto 360 and LG's G Watch R, both of which embarrassingly lit up dim bars and restaurants with in my push notifications, the Pop was a subdued accessory. It looked great, and it was a personal secret that it motivated my tracking. Part of its unique appeal is how you don't immediately recognize that the wearer has a fitness tracker.

The complaints, especially for a $150 device, are few. The app's dashboard display could be slicker. The butterfly shape of the main display gives equal importance to metrics like your weight, your heart rate, and your step count, all readings ideally done with other Withings devices like their smart scale. But if you, like the watch, only care about your steps, it'd be better to have that be the main focus, like you see on the iPhone's Health app. The interface, however, is easy to get over since you can just focus on the small dial that shows your progress, and sync up whenever you remember.

Under duress, from required research for a feature magazine, I finally understand the resurgent appeal of the mechanical watch in the iPhone era.

Withings understands that we still have a soft spot for unimprovable designs, like the watch face, and the brand borrowed the best parts of those aesthetics for the Activité and the Activité Pop. They paired that with an understanding of what we essentially want from an activity tracker: a lucid display that, with a glance, gets you off the couch.

Originally published by Popular Mechanics

Alexander George Editor-in-Chief As Editor in Chief, Alexander oversees all of Popular Mechanics’ editorial coverage across digital, print, and video.

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