The Withings ScanWatch 2 with a recommended retail price of $350.00 has truly set itself apart from other smartwatches on the market. This chic, highly coveted watch houses the company's impressive and precise health tech in an elegant case. The design is aesthetically pleasing, offers comprehensive health monitoring, and comes with an FDA clearance for atrial fibrillation detection.

The Withings ScanWatch 2 is not a typical technical gadget for your wrist, but a classy watch that caters to your health monitoring needs. Although it looks like a conventional classy wristwatch on the exterior, it houses impressively accurate health-monitoring functions internally. Over the past few days, I've been using the ScanWatch 2 to assess its accuracy and utility.

The ScanWatch 2 is an excellent blend of a regular watch and a smartwatch, combining some connected functions with a traditional aesthetic design. This makes it very appealing to those who are not keen on having a full touchscreen watch on their wrist. The ScanWatch 2 looks, feels, and wears like an ordinary watch, but it is much more than that. It boasts a stainless steel case, a sapphire crystal dial, a 5ATM water resistance rating, and a hidden screen that comes to life when you raise your wrist or press the crown.

The screen on the ScanWatch 2 displays your heart rate, steps, workout modes, blood oxygen level, and skin temperature when you rotate the crown. However, the screen is not constantly active. Despite its elegant physical attributes and advanced health monitoring abilities, getting used to the weight of the ScanWatch 2, which stands at 74 grams, might take a couple of days, especially for night-time wear.

As for the technology employed in the ScanWatch 2, the watch includes a small 0.63-inch grayscale OLED screen, a multi-wavelength PPG heart rate sensor, a TempTech  module for body temperature readings, and an upgraded accelerometer and altimeter. The watch is able to provide body temperature data by measuring skin and ambient temperature in addition to the heart rate and movement.

The ScanWatch 2 is capable of taking an electrocardiogram reading and has been approved by the FDA for atrial fibrillation detection. It can also take on-demand blood oxygen readings, and it can alert you about a low or high resting heart rate. The ScanWatch 2 can track skin temperature during exercise and splits it into three different zones: Warm up, Performance, and Overheating, providing insights into your peak performance state for optimized workouts.

The ScanWatch 2 connects to both Android and iOS smartphones using the Withings Health app, but it was a little disappointing as it does not provide much unless you opt for a subscription package that offers a more comprehensive health data, Daily Missions for new habit formations, and Advanced Insights into how your data is integrated. Despite its shortcomings, the ScanWatch 2 remains an excellent fusion of beauty and health tech, weaving accuracy into a stylish design.