Withings ScanWatch 2 review: the hybrid that tracks your heart properly

Most smartwatches ask you to choose between looking like an adult and knowing what your heart is doing. The Withings ScanWatch 2 — unveiled by Withings on 1 September 2023 and on UK shelves from £319.95 — is the rare device that refuses the trade. It’s an analogue watch with proper hands and a small mono dial, and underneath it sits an FDA-cleared electrocardiogram. That combination is the whole pitch, and after two and a half years on sale it’s still one of the most coherent things in the category.

So let me be clear about where I land before I show my working: if you want clinical-grade heart monitoring without strapping a glowing rectangle to your wrist, this is the one I’d point you at. If you want apps, maps and a bright touchscreen, walk away now — this isn’t that, and it was never trying to be.

The case for a hybrid in 2026 (hybrid smartwatch)

The hybrid smartwatch is an awkward middle child. It doesn’t do the flashy things an Apple Watch does, and the purists who want a real Swiss movement won’t look at it either. What Withings has done is pick a lane and commit: this is a health instrument wearing a dress watch’s clothes. The hands tell the time, a tiny circular display handles notifications and metrics, and the headline trick is that the whole thing runs for weeks rather than hours.

That last point matters more than the spec sheet makes it sound. PCMag UK’s 2024 review and Withings both quote up to 30 days of battery life — some usage patterns stretch it nearer 35. The practical upshot is that you charge it roughly once a month, which is the single biggest reason a device like this earns its place. Sleep tracking is only useful if you actually wear the thing to bed, and you only wear it to bed if you’re not forever hunting for a cable at 11pm. A 30-day battery isn’t a luxury here; it’s what makes the health data continuous enough to be worth reading.

The 30-day battery isn’t a luxury spec — it’s the thing that makes every other health feature actually usable, because a watch on the charger measures nothing.

The heart stuff is the point

Here’s where the ScanWatch 2 stops being a nice-looking accessory and starts being a reason to spend £319.95. It carries an FDA-cleared ECG and on-demand atrial fibrillation detection through irregular rhythm notifications — features Withings spells out in its gen-two press materials and PCMag confirms in testing. You place a finger on the bezel, hold for around 30 seconds, and the watch records a single-lead trace it can flag for signs of AFib.

I want to be careful about what that means. This is not a diagnosis, and nobody should treat a wrist reading as a substitute for a cardiologist. But AFib is the kind of condition that hides — it comes and goes, and it often shows up precisely when you’re nowhere near a clinic. A watch you wear every day for a month at a stretch is exactly the sort of thing that can catch an episode you’d otherwise miss and hand you a trace to take to your GP. That’s the genuine value proposition, and it’s why I rate the ECG far above the step counting.

It doesn’t stop at the trace, either. Withings’ gen-two materials list overnight pulse-oximetry (SpO2 blood-oxygen spot checks) alongside the ECG, and the temperature sensing rounds the package out: 24/7 body-temperature variation tracking that feeds into sleep and cycle insights rather than giving you a thermometer reading. None of those is a headline on its own, but together they’re why the full ScanWatch 2 reads as a health device rather than a fitness toy. Pair that with proper REM-aware sleep staging in the Withings Health Mate app and you start to see why Withings calls this a watch you read rather than one you poke at.

Where it’ll frustrate you

Let me not oversell it. The display is small, monochrome and deliberately minimal — you get the time, a metric or two, and notifications you can glance at but not really act on. There’s no GPS of its own, no contactless payments, no app store, no maps. If your idea of a smartwatch is a wrist computer, the ScanWatch 2 will feel almost stubbornly austere.

That austerity is a feature, not a bug, but only for the right buyer. The reward for giving up the bright screen is the month-long battery and a watch that genuinely looks like a watch in a meeting. The penalty is that anything beyond health tracking and basic notifications happens on your phone, not your wrist. You need to want that bargain. Plenty of people don’t, and they should buy something else without guilt — an Apple Watch Series 10 or a Garmin will out-feature it on every line except the two that matter most here, battery and discretion. Neither, though, will pass for a proper watch on a dressed-up wrist, and that is precisely the gap Withings is selling into.

The decision Withings actually wants you to make

The more interesting fork isn’t ScanWatch 2 versus Apple Watch — it’s ScanWatch 2 versus its own cheaper sibling. Withings sells the ScanWatch Light at £229.95, and on a shelf the two look near-identical. The £90 gap buys you the things that make the full model matter: the Light drops the ECG, drops AFib detection and drops the 24/7 temperature tracking.

Here’s how the two line up on the specs that actually decide it:

So the question answers itself. If you’re drawn to this design purely for the look, the long battery and clean sleep and activity tracking, the Light gives up nothing you’d miss. But if the heart monitoring is why you’re here — and it should be, because it’s the only thing in this range you can’t get from a dozen other minimalist watches — then the Light is a false economy. Paying £229.95 to skip the headline feature is the wrong saving. Spend the extra £90 or buy a different watch entirely; there’s no sensible middle.

Has it dated?

It’s fair to ask whether a watch announced in September 2023 still holds up in mid-2026. Hardware-wise, nothing about the proposition has aged badly — the ECG is the same medically meaningful feature it was at launch, the battery still embarrasses every full-screen rival, and the analogue design is, if anything, more appealing now that the market has drowned in identical black rectangles. The Expert Reviews hands-on from launch flagged the same strengths I’d lean on today, which tells you how little the core argument has shifted.

What you are betting on is Withings’ software continuing to mature around the hardware, since the watch itself isn’t going to sprout new sensors. Two and a half years in, that bet has held: the Health Mate app remains free for the core readings, and the company has kept shipping firmware rather than walking away. If you do buy, buy direct from Withings UK or a stockist like John Lewis or Amazon UK where the two-year warranty is clean — the ECG is a regulated feature, and you want a proper UK chain of support behind it, not a grey import.

Who I’d actually hand it to

I’d put the ScanWatch 2 on the wrist of one very specific person: someone who wants real heart monitoring, hates charging gadgets, and would rather wear something that passes for a proper watch than a screen. For that buyer, £319.95 is well spent — there’s genuinely nothing else that does all three at once.

For everyone else, be honest with yourself. If you want apps and a vivid display, this will disappoint you daily. If you only want the look and the long battery, the £229.95 Light is the smarter purchase. And if the ECG is what’s tempting you, don’t let that £90 talk you into the lesser model — that’s the one corner not worth cutting. The ScanWatch 2 is a narrow recommendation, but within its lane it’s still the watch I’d reach for, and I don’t say that about much hardware this old.