Withings Scale

The problem with scales is their ephemeral nature: it reads your weight and once you step off, the measurement is gone. You can record it, but that seems so tedious. The Withings scale neatly solves this problem: it’s a scale for the app generation. First, it’s connected to wifi so it uploads your weight to the cloud, as it were, where it keeps a historic record. Not only is there a website, but also a iPhone and iPad apps with nice graphs of your weight and the the other measurements it tracks.

These other measurements seem like some kind of voodoo: lean mass and fat mass, some kind of BMI thing. I don’t really trust that those can be measured through your feet, so just ignore them (clearly from my not knowing what they are).

It works with more than one person, too. It tries to identify by weight, and the weights are too close, the scale asks you to step on the left or right side to identify yourself.

There are some awkward things: the scale is so pretty, with a glass top that you’re alway afraid you’ll break it; the setup over a USB cable is weird (there’s an iPhone way to do this, but I stopped short of doing it least I screw it up); and you have to wait around 30 to 60 seconds between measurements.

But overall, if you’ve always found scales kind of not, well, updated to the rest of the world, you’ll like the Withings Scale. I actually find it very helpful my weight losing: it’s fun to take your weight and check out the pretty graphs. Once you build up several months of data, it gets even better.

I got the scale as a birthday gift, my wife knowing what kind of dork I can be. It’s expensive, compared to unwired scales, but I’d go for it.