I gather that increasing numbers of people these days use their cell phone to tell the time, and don’t bother with a watch.
However, the watch is fighting back. Behold, the quad band GSM phone in a wristwatch, with Bluetooth (so you can pair it with a headset for phone use) and OLED display showing analog hands. Plus 1.3MP camera, kinetic battery recharge, and MP3 player.
At 13mm thick it’s still pretty bulky, but not much worse than my Casio G-Shock.
I’m too mathematically minded to gamble in Vegas, but I still find myself thinking that I’ve been unlucky when it comes to winning contests and prize draws. Rudyard Kipling would say that I won God’s lottery, but somehow that’s small consolation.
The feeling of unluckiness started in childhood. My cousin managed to win money on the Premium Bonds several times (as I recall), but I never did. I continued to enter pretty much any free contest I encountered, year after year, even if it meant actually reading the junk mail sent to me by Reader’s Digest. I don’t think I ever actually won anything, though.
Until last month.
One of my random interests is wristwatch design. Though my everyday watch was chosen for its rugged reliability, I’m always eyeing more impractical timepieces, like those covered on Wrist Dreams.
Said web site ran a contest last year. I entered, and in December I was rather startled to get e-mail saying I’d actually won. My prize was 1000100101, a retrofuturistic watch that looks like a miniature control panel from an old Sci Fi movie. It was supplied by Tokyoflash Japan, who seem to have cornered the market in amazingly interesting and odd watch designs.
The watch arrived in December. I deciphered the instructions and set the time and date, but quickly discovered a problem: the time simply didn’t advance, and after some random interval the watch would reset to 6:59. I contacted Tokyoflash and they sent me a replacement; I mailed back the broken one. The replacement arrived just after Christmas, as I missed the mailman on Christmas Eve.
The replacement watch works fine, and it’s great. It has a solid metal casing and a thick leather strap, and you can set it to randomly animate the time mit das blinkenlights every 15 minutes if it doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention. I’ve posted a picture. It’s the kind of thing I probably wouldn’t have bought for myself, but now that I’ve won it I like it a lot. So if you’re looking for an eye-catching watch for special occasions, I can recommend heading over to Tokyoflash’s web site and browsing around.
Now, off to enter more contests…
My new watch arrived. Casio G-Shock. I’ve never had a Casio last less than five years, which is two more than the expensive Seiko managed. Reading the web, it seems that Seiko Kinetics are quite notorious for breaking. It probably doesn’t help that I tend to occasionally walk into walls, doors, and other solid objects, but still…
Essential features of the new watch: time, date, day of week, 24 hour format, waterproof (to 200m), solar powered.
Non-essential features I got anyway: titanium casing, sunrise/sunset times, moon rise times, tide indicator, moon phase indicator, stopwatch, multiple alarms, countdown timer, and everything works across multiple named world time zones. Plus the backlight can be set to come on automatically when (a) you’re holding the watch at the right angle that you’re probably looking at it, and (b) it’s dark.
As you can imagine from the feature list, there’s quite a bit of configuration and setup to do. Each location needs time zone, longitude and latitude, and tidal offset time. In short, this is a watch for the seriously geeky. I’ve installed Linux distributions that were easier to configure.
But now it works, and I can push a few buttons and find out when the tide will come in by my parents’ new house in Bournemouth.