A Pretty Neat Digital Watch

Rave

Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy starts, “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

The problem is that anybody who has tried to set both a digital watch and an analogue watch doesn’t actually think that digital watches are a “pretty neat idea”. They’re just too hard to use. I’m convinced that half of the travel dread I feel is caused by the trepidation of having to re-set my watch by mashing four identical and just-too-small-for-my-fingers buttons. Analogue watches, back in the day, had this great invention: it was called a crown. To set the time you’d pull the crown, turn it, and push it back in. That’s it. I challenge you to describe, in detail, how to set a normal digital watch over the phone. Referring to the watch while you do it is cheating, of course.

Timex has an answer: the “i-control”, which is really just a fancy name for putting a crown and a digital watch together. Finally!

Unfortunately, for reasons unfathomable, Timex seems to have made these watches terribly difficult to find. With some sleuthing I was able to find an i-control adorned women’s watch and men’s watch.

The only thing that could be simpler is a watch that sets itself. Imagine, a watch with no controls: it would just work. Now that’s a digital watch I’d think was pretty neat.

I think that’s a pretty neat idea. My current watch is a Timex that mimics a chronograph digitally but has both an analog and digital face: I can hide the digital part of it by pressing a button and leave the clean lines of a analog watch (which I prefer). Since I enjoy the benefits of digital for cycling and training and such, it’s nice to have that option.

One of the watches I’m quite into are kinetic watches — a friend of mine has a Seiko that runs off his energy. I’m quite into the idea of a watch that doesn’t require a third party battery source.

Ah, a watch that just works with no controls, adjusts itself to any time zone you were in and so on and so forth. That’s a watch indeed.

Come to think of it, a watch that just works with no controls and adjusts itself to any time zone you’re in does sort of exist–it’s a cell phone!

Unfortunately, almost everything else about my cell phone is confusing… But setting the time is a breeze, because I don’t have to.

I think this is actually one of the big reasons I don’t use a wristwatch anymore… I carry my flippy cell with me wherever I go, and the OSD on the front always shows the time in nice, big text. That and the clock on my laptop are pretty much the only clocks I own, so I didn’t even have to remember to change anything when Daylight Savings Time rolled around last weekend.

Unfortunately, my cell phone doesn’t set itself. That ability is carrier dependent–I suppose I chose the wrong carrier.

I’ve had a very hard time finding a phone that sets the time itself. So far, I have found none.

Verizon has been transmitting the local time to their phones since at least early 2003, which is when I started using them.

Aside from that, I’d definitely say that Verizon is a pretty “hassle-free” provider–I’ve had virtually no problems with dropped calls and coverage, and their customer service has been great.

I suspect that the time zone setting function on a cell phone is manufacturer dependent. My carrier is the same as Aza’s and my phone readjusts time automatically within the confines of the USA. Have not taken it elsewhere.

On watches, I use an analog watch for a number of reasons including ease of setting and resetting. I also read the time without looking at the numbers…the hands are positional.

Kinetic watches have been around for ages. You have to wear them so they keep self-winding. Less toxic waste.

Digital watches that use the WWV time signal to (re)set themselves exist. You never have to remember to change to or from DST. You do have to set the timezone if you travel. Ask Mr. Google for atomic watches.

Some of the atomic watches are solar powered, too, so Naz would be happy. Well, except for the timezone part.

I love the idea of wrist watches without any control and adjust to any time zone. If cell phones can do it then wrist watches should be able to do it.

Atul is saying that he does’t uses any other watches but what if your cell phone battery is finished . I would not like to open my lap top to look for the time(I do not have my lap top with me all the time).

Cell phones rely on local towers to set time. Traveling within a 25 mile radius of my home can sometimes cause my cell phone to change ‘time’ at least 3 or 4 time. Why the discrepancy?

I can only assume the cell towers maintain their own time. Though it is nice to land on a plane and have it instantly change. The reliability of the accurate time is a bit far from certain (My carrier is T-Mobile).

In order for a watch to set time based on time-zone, it would have to know it’s own location. Other than GPS, I can’t see a reliable way to do that. The ‘atomic clock’ radio waves also cover most of the US, which is neat.

It’ll take a while but I’m sure we will get closer to this ideal of a watch that just works, no matter where.

Oh, c’mon! Digital watches are not hard to set, and it’d be very easy to describe the process over the phone. Let’s compare the instructions:

Analog:
- Pull the crown until you hear a ‘click’.
- Roll it to set the time.
- Press the crown back in.

Digital:
- Press the ’set’ button until the number you want to adjust is blinking.
- Use the ‘+’ and ‘-’ buttons to adjust it.
- Press the set button until nothing blinks.

Not only is the digital watch not harder to set, it’s also more intuitive. (Unless you have an analog watch with “pull to set ->” on the backside pointing towards the crown.)

On a digital watch the same interface works well for setting the date, too. Not so with an analog watch. It took me about 7 years before I noticed that I could set the date on my analog watch orders of magnitude faster by rocking the crown back and forth over the date-change “sweet spot”. Before that I had probably spent a total of over 10 hours adjusting the date by rolling the crown just very much. (IIRC I even built a battery-operated crown-roller out of lego.)

And then there are the multi-stop crowns that can be pulled out more than one step. Always when I adjust one of these (on a wrist watch, not on a big alarm clock) I somehow manage to get the crown over to the wrong stop, which make the time out-of-sync or somesuch.

And I find it extremely annoying that analog watches have the tendency to move the minute arm by a minute or so when you push the crown back in after setting the time. Then you have to reset it and wait a minute until the seconds are correct until you can try again. You can easily spend 10 minutes just trying to get the damn time correct.

I don’t use pc’s often, but. . .
InternetTime_S60.sis 34kb installed on my nokia 6680 (free)… Makes a quick connection and sets time from one of many selectable servers.

(Sorry for commenting on such an old post, but I just read it now since you linked to it from a more recent one.)

I have a watch that sets itself. It’s this one. I bought it 2 or 3 years ago at my local Target. (I think the one pictured must be a newer model than mine, since the items on that watch’s screen are not exactly the same as on mine.)

It automatically sets itself every night at 1:00 AM, by listening for a signal that is broadcast by the NIST. Of course, if the time is way off, such as when you’ve just changed the battery, its idea of 1:00 AM might be in the middle of the day, when ambient radio signals are more numerous and may prevent the watch from getting a clear signal from the NIST broadcast tower. But you can force it to try to set itself immediately by pressing and holding a button for a couple of seconds.

My Tissot watch is digital and has the same feature. How I love simplicity!

MSNDirect watches set themselves and adjust for timezone automatically. They also recieve weather reports - all this for the cost of the watch, no subscription required.

With a subscription, you can have your calendar, messages, stock reports etc. but if all you want is a watch that sets itself and adjusts for timezone, buy an MSNdirect watch from abacus and turn it on.

Regarding Cellphones:
The GSM/GPRS specification does not include a feature for updating the time in the phone. This was a big and obvious oversight, as NTP is almost the oldest protocol under TCP/IP. So very early on someone realised time synchronisation between computers was really quite essential…

Also the characteristics of cellphones mean that they like to keep their registration/connection with the current basestation as long as possible before they are forced to re-register with another basestation. So as you drive around, on average you are slightly driving away from the basestations. Due to doppler effect this means that the cellphone sets its crystal to run slightly slow, and as a result the real-time clock runs slow by the same amount., maybe a few parts-per-million.

3G/CDMA phone protocol does include a message for synchronising time in the handset, so these should maintain their clock-display correctly.

I have a Citizen analog/digital wristwatch that has a fully digital mechanism, but analog display. It’s a curious design, and used to be popular when I received it as a gift ten years ago.

It has four buttons: one to change the mode and the three to do different things depending on mode. It has four displays: the main clock face showing the time (12 hour) and three smaller displays showing the mode, the time (24 hour) and the week/month. It has a total of eight modes: time with seconds, time + date (the second hand will display the date, the small date display the week and month), two alarms, a timer (the week/month display will be the minutes left), a chronometer (the week/month display will be the hundredths of seconds), and time on another timezone.

However, despite all this, setting the time is not that hard. You pull out (yes, pull out) one button, and one of the remaining four, can’t remember which, sets the hours and minutes. One button resets seconds to 0.

The problem is, of course, first selecting the proper mode (the pull-out button enables setting mode in each mode individually…) and remembering which button adds one minute.

It’s not particularly easy to use unless you have read the manual. The week/month display is too overloaded, the 24 hour display I don’t ever watch, …

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Thanks
Kashif

I’ve been using a Timex Internet Messenger watch for many years now. Timex introduced a killer feature they called FlexTime which used the cellular system to automatically sync its time. Whenever I travel to another time zone, it immediately changes. But Timex seemed to have phased that technology out real quick, as it is a major battery eater. I have to swap my battery out monthly usually.

The watch also doubles as a pager, which I used when i first got it, but no longer pay for that service and just enjoy the FlexTime part.

Also, another main reason why I still use this watch is that it can store 5 alarms, and you can set intervals (daily, week days, week ends, weekly, monthly, annually) and then you can label each alarm. For instance, I have a take meds. daily alarm, and a pay rent monthly alarm, and a different time to take meds on the weekends because I usually sleep in.

Anyhow, this watch is awesome for those two features alone. It was discontinued years ago sadly. I have yet to find another watch like it.

@Marcus Sundman
May 22nd, 2006 7:42 am

“And I find it extremely annoying that analog watches have the tendency to move the minute arm by a minute or so when you push the crown back in after setting the time.”

That’ll only happen with a quartz-watch. Go mechanical, and you don’t have that issue (and a whole nicer watch). Anyway, if crappy quartz is what floats your boat, then to overcome that issue, one must simply set the watch a few minutes ahead, then turn it back again, and then press the crown. When doing that the minute arm won’t move. This is probably mentioned in the manual that came with your watch, so a RTFM is in order here…;-)

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