Smartwatch has an appealing price
Activité Pop, $150, www.withings.com
As we await the arrival of the Apple Watch, manufacturers are rushing to refine their smartwatches and activity trackers. The French electronics maker Withings has released a new smartwatch called the Activité Pop that grabbed attention at the recent International CES in Las Vegas for its looks, simple features, waterproof design and astounding eight-month battery life.
It runs on a traditional watch cell battery, and it also has an appealing price: just $150.
Withings also makes a premium model activity-tracking watch, the original Activité, which costs $450 and is a Swiss-made timepiece with high-end components. It's lovely, but too expensive for many consumers.
The Pop, Withings said, is meant to be a more mass-market tracker, and although it does nothing more than track your daily movements (via a small dial on the watch face that runs from 0 to 100), the company said it believed activity was a fundamental component of health.
If you own a whole suite of Withings products, like its smart scale and blood pressure monitor, you could build a more complete picture of your health. But if you want a nice-looking, inexpensive and waterproof watch that gently motivates you to move a little more, the Pop does the job.
putting technology into a flower pot
Pot, pricing not announced, www.parrot.com
File this under laughable at first, but brilliant on second notice. The obviously named Pot, by the French electronics maker better known for its drones (among other devices) is a Bluetooth-connected flower pot that can sense the water level in a plant, then automatically water it from a reservoir on the side of the pot.
You use the Pot's accompanying app to specify what kind of plant you have, so the watering decisions are personalized to the plant, so to speak, and you don't waste water. It features a two-liter reservoir, which Parrot says can keep a plant watered and healthy for about a month. Parrot calls the Pot the "most advanced connected plant pot."
NEW YORK TIMES
