You might never know there's anything else inside the Activité were it not for the second, smaller dial in its bottom-right corner. That's the Activity dial, tracking your progress towards your fitness goals for the day. The Activité's accelerometer can track both steps and sleep, and connects via Bluetooth to your phone (iPhone-only for now) to sync with Withings' apps and other devices. It can also work as a smart alarm clock, gently vibrating to wake you up when you're at the lightest point in your sleep cycle.

An activity tracker for people who won't wear an activity tracker

The Activité enters into a Withings ecosystem that is ever more powerful at tracking your every move. The scale tracks your weight; the Pulse wristband tracks steps and sleep, plus blood oxygen levels and your heart rate; the Aura is an astoundingly accurate sleep-tracking device. The Activité is made to be a sort of entry point, the activity tracker for people who wouldn't normally want to wear an activity tracker.

If the Activité's features aren't groundbreaking, Withings' approach to building a smarter watch certainly is. Hutchings tells me the company's goal was always to be different from the Moto 360 or LG G Watch, to make something other than the standard screen-on-your-wrist design. For one thing, he says, almost as if he's surprised he needs to, a wrist-worn device should always tell the time. "If you take any activity trackers, they are really far from providing what we expect when we have something on our wrists, which is to be able to display time without pushing a button, without going in the shade because it's sunny, and without having to recharge it."

"We think smartwatches are currently giving a bad name to the watch," he says. "We did not want to build an extension of my smartphone on my wrist. We don't want to go to a Swiss army knife approach, having something that is ugly to wear." He wanted to build a device people wouldn't need to upgrade every year or two, but would keep for years and decades.