Withings ScanWatch Nova Brilliant Review: Beauty and the Heartbeat

There are smartwatches and there are smartwatches. The Withings ScanWatch Nova Brilliant is a hybrid that looks every inch a luxury wristwatch.

It’s the women’s version of the ScanWatch Nova, a hybrid in the style of a diving watch, which my colleague Chris reviewed last year. The workings, software and features are the same – but the design is different and so is my experience of it.  

One reason for this is that I’ve been using the Brilliant with a Withings smart scale and, as a health and fitness ecosystem, Withings is among the best for all-round health tracking.

My scale is the Body Smart, the most budget-friendly in Withings’ latest line of smart scales. But by any standard, it’s a comprehensive smart scale, and if you use it with the Nova Brilliant, the smartwatch fills in the missing features, such as an ECG, that you’d only get on a pricier model.

You can check out our comparison of the three latest models in our guide on which Withings smart scale to buy.

Design & Build

• High-quality stainless steel build
• Suitable for swimming and showering
• Up to 30-day battery life

If you don’t like the screen-on-a-strap look of a typical smartwatch, the design of the Nova Brilliant is one of the key reasons to buy it. It’s the only watch I’ve ever worn that people have pointed out and complimented, and each time, the person was surprised when I said it was a smartwatch.

It’s a hybrid, which means it has a traditional analogue watch face, along with smart features. You interact with these using the crown to scroll through options that appear on an inset high-res grayscale OLED display.

The ScanWatch Nova Brilliant comes in two colour options: Titanium Grey (which I’m testing) and Gold. Both models have a silver-coloured stainless steel case, crown and band, but the Gold model has a contrasting gold-coloured fluted bezel, crown and central links. Its watch face is white, while the Titanium model’s is a pearly grey.

I have quite narrow, bony wrists and lots of watches look like I’ve strapped a plate to my arm. The Brilliant doesn’t. It’s 39mm wide (the regular Nova is 42mm) and looks good, in a luxe, chunky way, on even my weak and bird-like wrists.

The watch glass is anti-reflective, box-shaped sapphire glass. The hands and indexes have a Super-LumiNova finish, which means they really glow in the dark. Remember this if you decide to wear it to bed for sleep tracking – its ghostly glow under the covers can otherwise be a bit of a terrifying surprise.

It has a 5ATM water resistance rating, so it can withstand water pressure down to 50 metres, which means you can wear it in the shower or to track your swimming, but I’ll freely admit I was too nervous to try this out during testing. However, my colleague Chris’s Nova has withstood many a bath time and water play session with his daughter.

The stainless steel bracelet strap is the default, but in the box you’ll also get a FKM (fluoroelastomer) wristband in the same colour as your watch face, with a stainless steel buckle. You can buy leather, metal or fabric straps instead – and see how they look on the watch on the Withings website.

The wristbands are fairly easy to switch out and the FKM band is obviously much lighter and should give more accurate readings, although I didn’t notice an appreciable difference between the two while testing.

As the bracelet strap was so comfortable, and is certainly more stylish, I ended up using it all the time and barely noticed I had it on, even in bed.  

Also in the box, you’ll get a cradle-style charger and wristband toolkit, which has everything you need to add or remove links yourself.

The charger is the only bit of kit that doesn’t live up to the high-quality nature of the watch itself. It’s a cheap-looking piece of plastic, whose only advantage is being small and light, which makes it easy to pack for travel.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Still, as the watch claims a generous 30-day battery life (although three weeks is more likely, if my testing was anything to go by), you won’t need to use it often. And when you do, it charges in a respectable two hours.

Health & Fitness Tracking and App

• ECG
• Sleep tracking
• No inbuilt GPS

The Nova Brilliant is essentially a luxe version of the ScanWatch 2, with the same workings, feature set – and the same limitations.

The watch has four sensors: an accelerometer, an altimeter, a temperature sensor, and a multi-wavelength PPG (to measure blood oxygen saturation).

These allow the Brilliant to provide a wide range of health and fitness measurements. In general, I found the health features to be much stronger than the workout feedback.

One of the most impressive features is its heart health monitoring. Select the ECG setting and place your hand around the watch as shown on the screen and you’ll get a reading in 30 seconds. It took me a few tries to get this feature to work and when it does, for most people, most of the time, the only reading you’ll get is: normal.

But for those who don’t, the information could be invaluable. You can also see your current heart rate on the watch, get a daily heart rate, overnight heart rate and notifications of any worrying patterns.

You can access respiratory insights in the same way and get a blood oxygen reading, which appears as a percentage.

Wear your watch at night and you’ll also get comprehensive sleep analysis – although there’s no differentiation between deep and REM sleep. I found the sleep tracking to be pretty accurate, although I had the opposite problem to the one experienced by my colleague Chris with the regular Nova, where he felt that the tracker was giving him an overly rosy view of his sleep schedule.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

I think of myself as a good sleeper and tend to overlook or swiftly forget the times I wake up in the night or have problems going back to sleep, all of which the tracker mercilessly exposed. As a result, I started being more aware of tiredness in the mornings and worrying about getting enough sleep, so I stopped looking at the analysis except on weekend mornings, when I could stay in bed longer.

There’s also menstrual tracking but this isn’t a feature that I’d use and, given the world’s current political climate, I wouldn’t recommend that people share this kind of data with a company.

You can also relax with a guided breathing session, but I found this more perplexing than useful.

There’s also workout tracking, which is less comprehensive. Some forms of exercise, including walking, running and cycling, are automatically tracked. Others, such as Pilates, you’ll need to choose from the workout menu and let it know when you complete the session.

Compared to the Fitbit I’d been using previously, both the step counting and estimated calories burned are far more accurately rendered. The Brilliant doesn’t feature built-in GPS – which should be a given at this price point – but if you have location services turned on your phone, you can get more detailed feedback.

Foundry

But there are some inaccuracies to deal with. For example, I’d regularly see cycling sessions automatically entered in the app and it took me a while to realise that they coincided with tube journeys. It seems odd that the software didn’t twig that my heart rate didn’t increase during these sudden and speedy cycling sessions. It must have been judging from the motion alone – but perhaps I find the tube more exciting than I thought.

Speaking of the app, this is one of the big benefits of the Nova Brilliant. Throughout the testing period, the watch and app synced seamlessly, something that was noticeable and pleasing after coming from the increasingly buggy iOS Fitbit app.

The app is also very high-quality. It features a wealth of data, but it’s all nicely laid out and comes complete with explanations for each metric.

Even better, if you use it in conjunction with a Withings smart scale, all your measurements appear on the same dashboard.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

As a pairing, it’s an excellent way of keeping on top of your overall fitness as it shows everything from body composition trends, to sleep quality, to heart rate and daily steps all in one place.

There’s also the option to subscribe to Withings+, through which you can access workout videos, join a fitness programme, get a heart health check-up (depending on where you live) and more, although at £8.95 per month or £89.50 per year (US: $9.95/$99.50; EU €9.95/€99.50) it’s yet another subscription to find the money for and I don’t think it’s necessary.

People who are seriously into sports and don’t want to invest in a smart scale or Withings+ will find that there are far cheaper smartwatches that will give them more granular detail about their workouts.

Smartwatch Features, Battery Life & Charging

• 30-day battery life
• 2-hour charging
• Watch notification alerts

One of the best things about the Brilliant is its battery life, which in my experience, lasts a comfortable three weeks. It makes a huge difference to have a smartwatch that you don’t need to charge every few days or every night, and that you can rely on not to conk out in the middle of the day.

But if you want a fully-featured smartwatch, this is not it. What you will get is a vibration alert when you get a call, message or app notification (you can toggle permissions in the app) and you can see who’s calling as well as the caller’s name scrolls across the OLED screen.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

That’s pretty cool and it’s handy for screening calls. There’s not really space to read a message, however, so you’re better off using the watch as an alert and picking up your phone to find out more.  

You can also set a vibration alarm – but that’s it where smart features are concerned. Again, if you want a full suite of smart features, a hybrid like this isn’t for you.

Price & Availability

Price is the big sticking point where the ScanWatch Nova Brilliant is concerned. It’s £549.95 in the UK and $599.95 in the US. In terms of dedicated smartwatches, you can get more smart features for much less.

You can see how it stacks up against the competition in our round-up of the best fitness trackers, or check out our top recommendations for fully-featured smartwatches.

Still, if you’re into luxury watches and you look at it from that perspective, it’s not outrageously priced for the package it provides.

In the UK, you can buy it from Withings, among other retailers. As we can’t find any meaningful discounts elsewhere, we’d recommend buying from Withings in case of any issues, as its customer service tends to be good.

It’s a similar story in the US, where we’d again recommend buying directly from Withings.

Should you buy the Withings ScanWatch Nova Brilliant?

If you’re looking for overall health tracking, with information on sleep tracking, heart health and step counting all in one of the best-looking smartwatches we’ve ever tested – and you have deep pockets – the Withings ScanWatch Nova Brilliant provides a high-quality experience.

Its perfect app syncing, data-rich app and long battery life make using it seamless and simple. Throw in a Withings smart scale, and you’ll get all-round health tracking, which is ideal if you’re embarking on a fitness journey.

However, it is a very expensive piece of kit and for the same money, you could get a full-featured smartwatch with third-party app support. And for much less, you could get a fitness tracker that does most of what the Nova Brilliant does – with the addition of GPS, granular workout data and more.

The key choice here is style or substance.