Withings, the mobile-connected health-monitoring people, have just announced a brand new bathroom scale. Only this isn’t just another scale that’ll Tweet your weight to a disinterested world. It has hookups to monitor not just your body, but also the home you live in.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – UK-based Fitbug is new to the U.S., and makes gadgets very similar to Fitbit — but they weren’t shy about letting us know they were the first to come up with the idea.
“We were first.” Fergus Kee, Fitbug’s Executive Chairman, stopped short of actually saying fitness gadget-maker Fitbit is a wholesale clone of his company — but he got pretty close.
Whenever I read the name “Wahoo,” I can’t help but think of Mario jumping, punching the air an screaming it in his falsetto tones. Wahoo!
Then I come back down to Earth, take a sip of coffee and a deep breath, and realize that Wahoo is the maker of fitness gadgets, geegaws and dongles. So I guess it does — in some convoluted way — have something to do with jumping.
Today’s Wahoo (Wahoo!) item is the Wahoo Balance Smartphone Scale, a scale for weighing your smartphone (except the Galaxy Note, which will overload it). Just kidding. It’s actually a Bluetooth-enabled scale for humans (although the Note really will overload it).
I bet you never thought you’d feel early-adopter’s remorse for a bathroom scale, right? Well, if you bought the Withings Wi-Fi-connected scale to wirelessly share your weight and BMI with the world (or just with your own suite of fitness apps) then prepare to get stressed out, and maybe to comfort yourself with a big slice of rich, delicious chocolate cake: The Withings WS30 is here.
Out of the box, the iHealth HS3 Wireless Bluetooth Scale ($70) is somewhat impressive. With its digital (albeit not backlit) display and snazzy looking-glass top, this is a scale that will at least look spiffy in your bathroom when company is over. Even in the box, the scale makes a good case for gadget adoption: It promises to keep track of your weight, calories and exercise easily using only the scale itself and an accompanying app that can be used on your iPhone or iPad. Technically, the iHealth Scale does do that, but there are a few kinks that make this product’s promises fall flat.
Despite all our 21st-century technical wizardry, one of the easiest and least expensive ways to get a very basic idea of physical health is through a metric that’s been used for a very long time: body weight.
The Withings WiFi Body Scale ($160) takes this concept to the next level in many ways, including allowing you access to all your data on a gorgeously designed iOS app. It also adds an even more important metric, body fat percentage, and goes a long way to erasing many of the pitfalls using a simple scale can lead to — and it does this all while remaining incredibly easy to use. In fact, it might be the most effective tool I’ve used to keep healthy.
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![iHealth HS3 Wireless Bluetooth Scale: Down to the Bare Bones [Review, Fitness Special]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/ihealth-1.jpg "ihealth-1")
![Withings WiFi Body Scale: Quite Possibly The Best Way to Live Longer [Review, Fitness Special]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/withings-cover-1.jpg "withings-cover-1")
