WatchBlogs: Musings of Luxury Automatic Wristwatches

This watch may look like an ordinary watch:

…with one exception, can you guess what it is?

Besides the fact that the picture is a little blurry, I’m sure you will notice that there is indeed a wire sticking out of it.  Why is that?  It’s because this watch is not only a watch, but also a USB Flash Drive!!!

I don’t even know where to begin with this idea, but this has got to be one of the stupidest watches I’ve ever seen, and here’s why:

I get the appeal, it’s a watch that also doubles as a watch for those of whom supposedly need data wherever you go, but here’s a problem, while the watch can store up to 1GB of data, you still need a USB cable to extract it, and that cable tends to be larger than, I don’t know, a normal USB flash drive?!?  So what’s the point?

I don’t know why I bother to ask, becaseu I already know the point…

You see products like these are for idiots.  It’s for people that go about town in Segway scooters and like items that are two or three things in one.  They are for flat, uninteresting, talentless, and socially idiotic men who have no interesting characteristics or qualities and go about buying quirky gadgets in the hope that some curious girl will one day inquire about these silly items and become swept of her feet and the interesting gadgetry.

Well unless you are a James Bond sort of spy you need these kind of junk to sneak across the border or something, I suspect that whatever girl who inquires about your watch is going to get her answer and then go about her day while your own social inadeqacies are going to keep you a virgin for the rest of your life.

I hate these stupid gadget watches.  They are stupid!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Imagine this!  It is the afternoon of July 1st, 1941 and you are sitting at home watching the baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies on TV.  When suddenly a watch appears on screen, over a map of the United States with a spokesman stating that “America Runs on Bulova Time!”

If you were watching NBC’s New York City’s affiliate at that time you may have raised an eyebrow at this oddity, but then again you may not have noticed that what you have witnessed was the first television commercial in the world.

Want the details? Well there are no details except to say that the ad cost about $9 back in the day, which I think is about $135 now.  Hmm… that seems to be it…

Now Bulova as a company is known for being innovative to a degree.  Their watches and there unusual movements may not appeal to many, but when it comes to innovation I had no idea it extended to outside of watches as well, and my I am indeed eager to see this history making TV spot.  I am sad to say, however, that my 4 minutes of so trying to find this commercial on the web has resulted in failure so if you know where I can view this, I would be somewhat grateful.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The former President of Russia wore a watch that cost as much as a luxury car.

The President of Italy wears watches that cost as much as a house.

And even the the modest President Clinton rolls around in a Panerai.

Now when I first mused about this a few weeks ago, the possibility that the President of the greatest nation in the world would roll around the greatest residence in the world with a gift shop trinket on his wrist was only a possibility, but now it is a definite reality, and I am pleased with the outcome.

Now I am not one to generalize especially with my sparse knowledge of anything remotely political, but it seems to be the trend of Presidents of late to try to relate to the common people more by wearing a cheap watch.  George W. Bush did it with his cheap Timex, and I heard that when President Clinton was in the White House he skimped on expensive watches for more basic ones.  Forget the hordes of Secret Service goons, private airplane, helicopters, and instant access to the hottest nightclubs, a President seems to think that if wears the same kind of watch as us ordinary people, then he can somehow relate to us.  Gimme a break!

Speaking of Secret Service goons, if you ever seen watch now President Barack Obama wears on his wrist and ever wondered, “what kind of watch is that?”  Well wonder no longer.

As a recent birthday present for President Obama, his Secret Service goons thought of the laziest present known to man.  They went to the Secret Service shop, bought a watch, gave it to him, and now it’s his daily wearer.

It was produced by the no name company of Jorg Gray, who basically sells cheap Chinese watches of which you can put a logo on and there you have it!

The End!

Popularity: 9% [?]

What I like about Rolex is that they never seem to shamelessly cater to the idiots out there.  They know that no matter what they do and what disasters may encounter this world, they will turn out alright.  If the rich people of a capitalist nation gets overthrow, the new dictators will gladly pick up the slack.  Rolex watches have been the staple in luxury watches and a household name.

You have heard me rant about the endless stream of limited edition watches and logoed watches that other companies make in the hopes of making money.  Omega, for example, makes a new limited edition watch every couple days, and while I was just typing that sentence, a dozen new limited editions came out while I was doing that.  But believe me when I say that when Rolex comes out with a special edition whatever, it really is to mark an occasion.

And what occasion is more special to Rolex than the 50th Anniversary of their iconic Rolex Submariner:

Rolex Oyster Perpetual Submariner Date Steel Mens Watch 50th Anniversary Edition 16610LV

To be honest, in my lifetime I can’t really remember a Rolex limited edition, and 50 years of an icon is certainly something to celebrate.  This watch is just like the standard Submariner date except with the obvious change from the black bezel to the green bezel, but some other subtle changes are on it as well, such as the addition of larger markers on the dial.

The only probably with this Submariner is that there doesn’t seem to be any limit to its production.  Where I concede that Omega and the lot come out with a lot of limited edition wathes, they actually go about LIMITING their production, but with this Submariner I can find this Submariner everywhere I go.

Popularity: 8% [?]

If you have ever been to a museum you will know that it is largely a big tourist trap for a bunch of people to go to and pretend as though they’re interested in stuff.  From all the world over parents they take their obnoxious kids to marvel at the pretty colors of fish, the size of the bones from long deceased creatures, take some pictures, and then leave.  But before they make their exit, they are inevitably going to notice the shop that sells goods related to their museum visit.

And in this conveniently placed “gift shop” they can buy tacky postcards to send to their relatives, so they know you are cool, in addition you can also purchase books which will never be read, and if you are lucky, you can even buy some freeze-dried ice cream which has the ability to instantly melt three dollars right out of your pocket.

At the upper echelons of these gifts though, you may notice there may be a small selection of watches.  Usually tucked away under the pristine protection of clear plastic, the logoed watches may look appealing as they sell for more than the usual junk they have there.

Now what can be cooler than having a watch with the logo of the National Air and Space Museum on your wrist? Well quite a lot of things quite honestly.

Back on topic though, I have literally been asked one question by a colleague of mine asking me what watch Barack Obama wears, and while I have known some time now, the answer has never really seemed to spark any kind of interest in me to discuss it, but here goes…

As a present for Mr. Obama on a recent birthday, his Secret Service goons went down to the Secret Service gift shop and thought of the laziest birthday present known to man.  They went down to the gift shop and got him a Secret Service logoed watch.  What’s most surprising though is that Barack Obama seems to wear it everyday!

Here it is with Joe Biden’s Omega Seamaster Professional in the distance:

And a close up:

Now the funny thing is that he traded a fairly respectable Tag Heuer for this.  Why?  Well I suppose it’s the same reason that he traded his massive gas guzzling Chrysler 300C for an economical Ford Escape Hybrid, he wants to practice what he preaches and so traded his Swiss timepiece for a American one, or so he thought.

Well I have done a little bit of digging on this one, but the watch is actually made in China like quite a lot of things in this country, and it actually starts off life as a Jorg Gray JGC6500 Chronograph like this one:

You may not have heard of Jorg Gray as a company, and there’s a good reason.  You see all they do is makes generic watches without logos on them so you can put your organization’s logos on them and thus disappoint your friends, family, etc. with your mail order junk.

So to conclude, like George Bush’s Timex, Barack Obama’s watch can be classified in a similar vein a being a piece of mail order junk.
The End!

Popularity: 12% [?]

This is the Jaeger LeCoultre AMVOX2 DBS Transponder Watch:

But unlike your average $40,000.00 watch, this one is a little bit different, and here’s how…

For starters, in order to even be given the opportunity to buy one of these, you need to have one of THESE:

Yes that’s right, this is the Aston Martin DBS, the newest Aston Martin and the same Aston Martin model that so famously rolled over the hills of Montenegro in the most recent James Bond film Casino Royale.  It costs $265,000 and comes with a 2 year waiting list.  Suffice it to say, there is a connection.

Fancy watches and fancy cars seem to go together like ham and cheese, but besides the lame writing on the dial, this watch actually has the ability to unlock and lock the car of your brand-new Aston Martin if you should choose to buy it.  It is unique too, because it uses this magical thing that’s practically unheard of in the Swiss watch industry called electricity.  And that electricity is used to activate this device that can control the car’s locking mechanisms from up to 10 meters away.

It is also very cleaver too.  You see instead of pressing things as archaic as buttons, all you have to do is touch the crystal to operate the locking functions and to operate the chronograph.  It’s almost like a Tissot T-Touch in that regard.

Essentially it is a VERY expensive car remote, but there is one problem…

You see while the watch can lock and unlock your car, you still need the key to start it.  Now if you are familiar with the keys of expensive and even not so expensive cars, you know that the key is usually integrated with the remote, so if you need the key to operate your car, what do you need the watch for?!?

The reasoning behind the folks at Aston Martin and Jaeger LeCoultre was probably that if you can afford the car, than you can afford the watch, and given the price of the car, I believe they may be onto something.

Popularity: 9% [?]

The most famous chronograph watch in the world is debatable, but there is no debate.  It’s the Omega Speedmaster Professional:

Omega Speedmaster Chronograph Men’s Manual Wind Watch Stainless Steel Brown Dial 311.30.42.30.13.001

The Rolex Daytona fans can moan all they want, but when it comes to mechanical chronographs, how can you beat the Omega Speedmaster Professional?

This watch, after all, was the first and for the longest time, ONLY watch worn on the moon.  Its most touted use, however, was when it was very prominently used to time the afterburner rockets that allowed the crippled Apollo 13 spaceship to fly home.

There are no doubts that this is one of the most historically significant watches out there, and if you ever looked its bezel,  that is, the rim of the watch, you will probably notice that it’s got a Tachymeter (or Tachymetre, or Tachometer):

Now what exactly IS a tachymeter you might be asking?

Well a real tachymeter is certinaly more complicated than a plastic rim with some numbers on it, but when it comes to watches, a tachymeter is used to measure speed, but there are some caveats…

Here’s how it works.  It takes pretty much any unit of distance, such as a mile, a kilometer, etc. and it tells you how many of it your are doing of it in an hour.  You start the chronograph and use it to measure the elapsed time it takes you to travel a certain measure of distance such as a mile, nautical mile, and what have you.

Okay, here we go:

For all intents and purposes, please do not focus on anything else on the watch EXCEPT the hand that it is pointed directly at the 12 o’ clock position.  I know a lot of people are thinking this is probably the seconds hand, but it is not.  In most mechanical chronographs this is the hand that times stuff.  (See the sub-dial at the 9 o’clock position with the numbers ‘20,’ ‘40,’ and ‘60,’ on it?  That is what is measuring the seconds.  If the chronograph is not engaged, the hand pointing at the 12 o’clock position will not move).

Okay let’s say we are traveling in a very fast rocket powered car with no speedometer.  We want to know how fast we are going but don’t have the faintest of idea, but we do have an odometer so when a new mile starts we engage the chronograph…

After the odometer travels that one mile we stop the chronograph, and as you can now see, the chronograph hand says it took us about 37 seconds to travel that mile.  If you look at the tachymeter reading, you can see that you have been traveling at about 97 miles per hour.  That’s pretty fast!

I’m sure you can see where some problems with this lie…

First of all, you would have to know how long a certain unit of distance is.  You would have to know how long a mile is, you would have to know how long a kilometer is, etc…

Secondly, and most important, you would have to be going at least 60 of that rate of speed for the tachymeter to be of any use.  If you take longer than a minute to travel that unit of distance you are done for.

It is so stupid, but it sets a perfectly reasonable speed to be the bare minimum of its use.  Whoever regularly goes up to 300 miles/hm per hour is a person I’d like to meet, and if he uses his watch as his only means of determining that speed, that’s pretty cool.

To a lesser extent a tachymeter can also be used to measure the total distance you have traveled, but that would requiring you to be traveling at a constant speed.  Bottom line is that I know why they have it the Omega Speedmaster Professional, it’s tradition, but why is it on so many automatic chronographs in this modern age still baffles me.

It is not needed, no one uses it, most people are not “speed masters,” so why can’t we just get rid of it?

Popularity: 9% [?]

This was the “limited” edition Omega Planet Ocean that came out when the latest James Bond movie “Casino Royale” was released:

… And while I must confess that I thought the engraving on the back was absolutely ghastly, the fact was that the only visible part of the watch that was changed was the “007″ on the seconds hand.

That was fine, because it just told the whole world that you were only dorky enough to buy a “general” James Bond limited edition watch as opposed to being so dorky as to buy a watch made specifically for a single movie.

With the latest Omega incarnation, however, all will be lost:

As I have already established before, all Omega owners are a bunch of pocket protector wearing nerds, but outside of the stupid writing on the crystal (or the dial, I can’t tell…) I think it actually looks quite good.  The dial is suppose to emulate the checkered pattern on the grip of Bond’s gun, and to be honest I think it looks really good, kind of like a dial Audemars Piguet would make.

That red writing of “Seamaster” is a nice touch too.  An apparent influence from the old Rolex SeaDweller/Submariners of old, but quite nice nonetheless.

I don’t know what it is with Omega and their stupid “limited” edition watches.  It’s gotten so out of hand that I suspect there are more limited edition watches than regular ones!  That was a bit of an exaggeration, but if you get rid of that stupid writing of the movie title, I’m sold.

I doubt that James Bond himself would wear such a watch, but I’m aching to see if he will be wearing the standard metal bracelet Omega Planet Ocean as I had long been suspecting:

Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean - 2201.50.00 Gents Watch

Popularity: 10% [?]

I will freely admit that even though I can drink, vote, and rent a car, I am still an overgrown child who is into video games.  The latest obsession being Tiger Woods PGA Tour ‘08 for the Playstation 3, this is game where you can actually buy WATCHES for your customized golfer, and that watch besides having no use in telling the time, can improve your golf game.  The selection is rather sparse, but I’ll let you know my latest watch is this:

Oakley 10-186 Judge Mens Watch

Now as a watch I rather like its look.  Like it’s sunglasses they seem to go after those in the market for “luxury” items that look as though they had been melted by the sun.  It is obviously some sort of attempt for a luxury goods company to cash in on the lucrative watch market, but it’s not half bad, I think I rather like this one at least:

Oakley 10-186 Judge Mens Watch

I’ll tell you this, if I ever do become a professional golfer, this is the watch I’ll wear, because as you can see in the game, it can improve your approach and recovery skills.

Popularity: 9% [?]

By far the most intricate quartz watch from Switzerland that I am aware of is the Tissot T-Touch:

Tissot T-Tactile T-Touch Screen Men’s Watch Stainless Steel Black Dial T33158851

…and that’s just a gimmicky gadget more for computer nerds rather than those serious about quality watches.

The further you go up in the price spectrum, the worse it becomes I’m afraid.

Take for example the Breitling Aerospace Advantage (which is Swiss for all you watch idiots out there):

Breitling Aerospace Avantage Mens Watch Chronograph Titanium Grey Dial E7936210-M513-130E

This watch is pretty expensive, but on the plus side it is a quartz watch that can track a second time zone, has a countdown timer, has an alarm, and also has a a chronograph.

That’s all good stuff, but wait!!!

This Citizen watch (which is of course Japanese), has got pretty much all that same stuff too:

Citizen Jy0010-50e Eco Drive Mens Watch

On top of that it can track the time in 43 world cities, is solar powered, syncs up with an atomic clock for infinitely precise time, and it’s got a perpetual calendar to boot.  Zounds!

Did I also mention that this, even factoring in any discounts likely to be had with the Breitling, costs $2,000 less as well?

Well if you’ve ever compared Japanese cars against European cars, I’m sure this won’t come as any surprise, but this is yet another arena in which the Japanese have got the Europeans finger licked.

The Japanese quartz watches being offered by companies like Citizen, Seiko, and Casio, offer much better value than anything the Swiss could hope for, and besides that, whereas the Swiss still struggle with basic multifunction quartz watches, the Japanese offer quartz watches that operate with solar power (or kinetic power), sync up with atomic clocks, and offer complex functions such as a perpetual calendar and minute repeater.

In other words, they are light years ahead, and when it comes to mechanical movements they have not only made mechanical watches with better value, but they have meshed old mechanical watch technology with all the benefits of quartz-watch accuracy as well.

Sure there are many good Swiss quartz movements out there in the entry-level watches you’d find out of Tag Heuer, Omega, and Rolex (made by ETA no less), but besides keeping just the basic functionality of time and date, and maybe  a chronograph, they don’t do squat.

And for me, it is seriously difficult to find a single Swiss, quartz-powered watch that goes beyond the same boring functionality that I had in my digital watches 20 years ago.

Quite frankly, when it comes to the quartz watch, I can’t entirely blame them.  I mean the Japanese did invent the quartz watch so they must be better with the stuff, and with so many people eating up the old school mechanical incarnations of the Swiss, why even bother?

I say let the Japanese do what they do best, and let the Swiss do what they do best!

Popularity: 11% [?]