Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)In short: If you need a capable, stylish watch, and you care little about alarms and other added functionality, stop reading now, and find another watch. This one is not for you. If on the other hand you want a watch for the nerdy business person/traveler, read on.
The first thing you notice about this watch is that it's heavy. The description says that it's got a "polished stainless steel gunmetal ion plated bezel". I have no idea what that means. But it sounds like it would be heavy, and it sure is. I've only owned the watch for a day, now, and it's holding up perfectly. Hurray for the gunmetal ions.
At 45mm from left to right edge, and 48mm wristband-pin-to-wristband-pin it's also rather large. I have more of an accountant wrist than a weightlifter wrist, and it looks big on me, although not freakishly so.
The other thing I noticed (even before buying it), is that the digital display is, well, ahem, different. My wife says it's ugly, and my daughter agrees. I guess it's a matter of taste, but the retro look is growing on me. Also note that, while the photo shows the watch with the standard display configuration, there is an alternative setting which sacrifices the display of the year (who needs that, really?) and the seconds, in favor of even bigger, more readable digits.
I am sticking with the standard setting, though, because I like to see the seconds ticking away on my watch, if only to see that it's actually working.
But the primary reason why I or anyone would consider this watch is the added functionality. For me, specifically: Alarms. I have yet to see a watch on the market that matches this one for the sheer number of alarms you can set up. 35! Who needs that many? I do. I know that I could use a cell phone or PDA for that, but these things tend to run out of battery or stay behind in the charger at just the critical moment when I need to be reminded of some important meeting.
So, 35 alarms sounds great. But there are a couple of caveats: Only 5 of the 35 alarms are recurring. And for those recurring alarms, the period is daily. There is no option to change the recurrence to weekly or some other regimen. This is a weakness vis-a-vis the Timex Ironmans, which offer more flexibility in this regard. The remaining alarms are non-recurring. They happen on a particular date, at a particular time, and then they're over, until you reset the "alarm channel" to a new date/time. The redeeming aspect about these one-off alarms is that you can assign a message to them. There's a choice of several preset standard messages, or you can enter a custom message of up to 14 characters. That's a nice touch. Setting these alarms is straight-forward, once you've mastered the user interface. The other obvious improvement I am waiting for, is the ability to sync to Outlook or some other calendar. Presumably, with current technology, this would come at the expense of battery life, in which case the watch would be no better than the cell phone I am trying to avoid for this very purpose.
What else is there? The watch is very different from most others, in the way you need to set your time. It's always set to STANDARD TIME in your time zone. Daylight savings is a setting that affects display and alarms, and is toggled on or off manually. This treatment of daylight savings seems smart at first, since it allows the adjustment to/from DST to be very quick and painless. Unfortunately, though, it has ramifications for the other nerdy feature of this watch: The list of 39 global cities, for which it purports to keep track of time.
It does, sort of....but not really.
The watch does translate the current standard time in your home time zone into a current standard time in the time zone of any one of these other 38 cities. But it is up to you to know, whether these other cities are currently using DST, or not, and to then toggle their DST setting accordingly. If you don't want to bother with such a chore, then the display is just as likely to be wrong as it is to be right, and therefore, in my mind, this feature is pretty useless.
There are more features, such as a timer (for countdowns, such as a kitchen timer), and a stopwatch. I have not yet used these.The watch has a backlight to allow using the watch at night. This backlight can be set to either amber or blue. It works in both colors, that's about all I can say about it.
The navigation menus to make all the functionality of this watch accessible are quite well laid out, despite some small inconsistencies (the toggle for DST in "time mode" is not the same button as the one for DST in "world time" mode). For my taste, the navigation is a bit less intuitive than the Timex Ironman, which stands out in that regard, but that's maybe due to the added features/complexity.
It's really too early to tell, whether this watch will be a good one. I have another Pulsar watch that I got from my Dad for my 18th birthday. That one still works, and with amazing accuracy, despite 24 years of harsh treatment. Whether this new one will stand the test of time remains to be seen.
So far, I would take off one star for the half-baked "world time" feature, and the lack of flexibility in setting recurring alarms. But I like the feel of heft and robustness of this watch, and despite the niggles the alarm settings are a life saver for me.
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Product Description:
World time: 39 cities, 5 daily alarms, 30 schedule alarms. Program 14 character message and beep alarm 1/100TH second stop watch records elapsed time up to 100 hours. 100 Lap/split with memory recall, count down timer scrolling display mode. Dual color LED back light. Power saving function, screw down case back and 100M water resistant.
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