I have spent five years of my life in a military academy where Casio's rugged, rough, manly, sometimes ugly look combined with (even by the harsh standards of a military school) indestructibility and enormous amount of geeky features made a perfect fit.
Since this past Tuesday I am a proud owner of a G-Shock GW9200 Riseman.
I am not going to do a review of this watch as many folks before me have done a pretty good job in doing so. And this is not the point of this post.
So to get to the point, let me first say that I love the watch. I love it from the moment I put it on my wrist. Love. It. Period.
And here is the point:
This is not a new model. Riseman has been introduced in 2008. Many of the cutting-edge unique features that made this watch a technological marvel at the time are now rendered obsolete by the invasion of smartphones to our pockets.
- The thermometer is cool but to get an accurate reading you have to take the watch off your wrist for 10-15 minutes. For most practical purposes, by the time I wait for the Riseman, I can simply pull my iPhone out and check Yahoo! Weather or any of the other three weather apps I have on my phone. About hundred times, actually. If I am alone and not afraid of looking like an idiot, I could even say something like 'Siri, what's the temperature outside' and I'll get a pretty accurate answer.
- The altimeter will never match the GPS in terms of accuracy.
- The barometer and the barometric pressure 24 hours graph are very cool but in theory, they should hardly be able to compete with the various weather apps in terms of weather-predicting ability (I have to say though, that by taking a short glimpse on the pressure graph I am able to tell where the weather is going actually better than Yahoo! Weather, but I guess it's just a case of Y! not providing so accurate forecasts for Sofia as for other cities in Western Europe or the USA).
- The countdown timer works fine but I can tell Siri to 'set a timer in fifteen minutes' and I'll get it running on my phone even before I manage to scroll to the Riseman's Timer mode.
- The five alarms are cool but again, setting an alarm on a 4-inch touchscreen is orders of magnitude faster than doing so using tiny beeping buttons and a 1-inch LCD.
Still, I bought a watch packed with features I'll rarely make any use of, that was engineered five years ago. And I did it happily.
Watches, more than any other gadget carry style. They are status signs, fashion accessories, story tellers. It is not a coincidence some rich folks flush huge amounts of money (in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars) for an IWC or a Rolex or a Patek Philippe. It doesn't matter that a Rolex will only tell the time and the date. It is not the feature list that matters. And it doesn't matter if a Rolex model is made decades ago. It is the 'I love fine watches, I appreciate their precision, engineering and look and I can afford to buy one' that matters.
My G-Shock with its rugged polymer black body tells toughness, persistence, active lifestyle, outdoors, sport, fight... I like the feeling and the style. I don't give a damn it is a five years old model.
But I'll never buy a five years old phone. Never. Ever.
The watch market is a bit special. I don't know if Apple is working on a watch or a watch-like device, but the potential is enormous, if the execution is right.
