Eric Carrel buys back Withings

Jun 22, 2018

It's kind of an old news now, but Eric Carrel, the founder of Withings, is buying back its company from Nokia, who bought it two years to expand it's wearable unit.
The reason I am writing about this, it's because I have been a happy everyday Withings user for more than a year now, wearing my Activité Steel (currently Nokia Steel) on every occasions.
I bought the Steel when the watch had already made its debut for two main reasons:

• it's way cheaper,
• it looks like a regular watch.

The whole concept behind it is intriguing: a watch like any analog one, with clock hands that mark time as it passes, but with a smart core equipped to count steps, monitor your sleep cycles, guess what activities you are doing, from swimming to tennis to anything else.
After Nokia bought Withings, I was worried it could wind the whole product catalog down if the sales would have been disappointing. I also feared it could make Withings lose it's original intuition: building a smartwatch that looked just like any analog one.
That luckily hasn't happened and Withings will begin walking on it's feet once again. Let's see how that works.

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