The well designed watch

When i was younger, i remember a teacher commenting on the fact that i wore a watch, and saying that she no longer felt the need to wear one as she always had her phone on her, were she to need to check the time. In fact, the main reason i wore a watch was so that i could use the alarm to remind me of when my cello lessons were, and being able to check the time at my convenience was only a side benefit. Regardless, it was true that the majority of students did not wear watches.

More recently, that seems to have changed, but the sight of an analogue watch or a digital watch is still uncommon; instead, almost everyone seems to have some kind of a smart watch. I personally also own a smart band; in some ways it’s nice, but it and almost every other smart watch that i’ve seen seem to fail at fifty percent of their name: they are all terrible watches.

I don’t think that i have high standards for a watch. In fact, i have only three criteria: i should be able to (a) tell the time, (b) at a glance, and optionally (c) see today’s date. I check the date on my watch frequently, so although it’s essential for me, i don’t think that it’s a necessary feature of a good watch. But to be able to tell the time at a glance is.

Both analogue and digital watches tend to do a good job of this. They display the time constantly, so all the wearer has to do to see the time is cast their eye towards their wrist, and they already know the time. Some watches make this a little harder; i own one watch that has a black dial, and i find that this results in a sufficiently lower contrast that i have to peer a little closer for a little longer. As a result, i find that i rarely wear this watch.

This general simplicity stems from the fact that the hardware is designed specifically for the purpose of being a watch. Analogue watches have the added advantage that the interface is also specifically designed for the purposes of telling the time. With practice, one can take in the whole watch face at a glance and understand the time even without having to parse any numbers, because the shape of the face at a time gives a clear indication of that time. Digital watches are not quite so bespoke, but the liquid crystal displays that they usually use have segments shaped to be able to display times, and not much else.

Smart watches, on the other hand, tend to lean all in on that “smart” descriptor, using high definition matrices that can display anything we could possible want. That flexibility can be helpful, if we want to read messages or browse pictures on our wrists, but comes at the cost of higher power usage. I haven’t charged my digital watch in over five years, and i usually replace the battery on my analogue watch every two or three years, but my smart band has to be recharged every two or three weeks, and that amount of battery incites jealousy among many of my smart watch wearing friends, who charge theirs every two or three days.

And to reach even a life of two or three days, these watches need to preserve power as much as possible, usually by making an always on display, or the ability to see the time with a glance at the wrist, optional. Instead, the wrist must be shaken or the screen tapped. Some people might consider this a fine compromise, but for me it was a frustrating extra step adding inconvenience to an ingrained manoeuvre. Furthermore, and this may be an issue with my particular device, it would use a sensor to adjust the brightness of the screen, but because the band lay at rest half beneath my sleeve, it would always adjust the brightness to an invisible level, meaning i had to wait for it to readjust itself every time i wanted to check the time.

I may be a minority, in that i don’t really want my watch to have smart features. The reason that i wear the smart band is primarily because it has a vibration alarm, which i find a more comfortable and effective way of waking up than an alarm. But i disabled all notifications, because i don’t want my wrist vibrating any time anyone says something that may be of importance (this might also be why the battery lasts so long for me). I want a watch that tells the time, and tells it well.

For most of my watch-wearing life, i wore a digital watch, and i still think that digital watches are often the best choice for people, as they are likely used to a digital watch readout, and the cheap ones are still accurate. My casio f91-w has been through a lot, including significant water exposure, and is still working just fine. But i prefer an analogue face, so i also often wear the watch i received from my grandparents for my eighteenth birthday. Before my birthday, i’d not heard of the mondaine brand, but i sent them a moodboard of watch designs i like, and they found this one, and i consider it to be one of the best designed watches imaginable.

The majority of mondaine watches copy the design of the swiss railway clock, designed by Hans Hilfiker in 1944. It features a pure white face, two thick black hands of different length but also of different shape, and a spoon-shaped red second hand. The hour hand is much shorter than the minute hand, and the minute hand is much more tapered, so they are very easily distinguished. The red second hand means that a quite glance can’t result in a confusion between the second and minute hand. The high contrast and light background make it easy to quickly see the time, even in low light conditions. And it has a date readout next to three o’clock.

The watch is not unnecessarily flashy, nor does it track my sleep schedule or let me reply to text messages. But as an instrument for telling the time, i have not seen any other watch, smart or not, that comes close to telling the time with the clarity that this watch provides.