Withings, the company behind the remarkably sensible Activite smartwatch line, debuted a new product today at CES: a smart thermometer.
The doodad, named Thermo, is incredibly anti-climactic. It’s a simple object, easy on the eyes, adorned with a scrolling dot matrix-style display and a single button. It checks your temperature. Then it tells your phone your temperature, and you can see it again in Withings’ app.
The idea is the cumulation of Withings’ specialty: clean-looking heath gadgets that track your health (or your family’s health) and make doing so simpler than it’d be if you relied on a notebook or clipboard.
It takes a certain type of tech-savvy family to buy into Withings’ ecosystem, but if you’ve already bought into it — maybe you own a smart scale or want one of these blood pressure monitors — the Thermo rounds the product line out in a nice way that’s not exactly exciting, but also not boring, either.
On first try, the Thermo took four attempts to read my temperature. The device isn’t final, I was told by a company representative at CES. It’s certainly possible I held it wrong.
The Thermo is set to launch sometime during the first three months of 2016 and will cost just under $100.