This is my new watch, acquired after an experiment in riding a fixed-gear bike whilst drunk resulted in the loss and/or theft of my old, twin-dialled watch.
Faced with buying a replacement, my geek-genes immediately kicked in and I picked up something I first yearned for as a d20-rolling, miniature-painting, ZX Spectrum-programming schoolboy: The Casio Calculator Watch. This is, according to the almost inch-thick instruction manual, the DBC-32. It cost me €35.
So, how is it? In short, it’s a fragile piece of junk, but I love it.
As you can see from the pictures, the watch, although barely a few days old, has already received some dings: both the the glass and to the bezel down below the keypad. The metal itself, chosen because it looked both classier and tougher than the plastic models, has more in common with a foil cupcake casing than actual metal. This has the advantage of making the watch very light, but the disadvantage of bruising as easily as a haemophiliac in a mosh-pit. In fact, the “brushed metal” finish is already well on its way to becoming a “scarred metal” finish.
But it’s all made up for in the functionality, right? Well, sort of. Apart from the obvious calculator mode, you also get a stopwatch (itself infinitely less useful day-to-day than a countdown timer), dual time, an alarm and a rather quaint “database” for storing “up to” 25 phone numbers. I didn’t buy this watch for any of these additions — I got it purely for the aesthetic — which is probably just as well. Modern interfaces, touch interfaces especially, have spoiled us. I still have the muscle memory from my digital watch-wearing school days to control this but faced with anything harder than switching on the backlight I reach in my pocket for my iPod Touch.
And about that light. You can set it to come on automatically when you tilt the watch to look at the screen. But there is a rather tiresome safety measure — if you choose the auto mode, it actually switches off after six hours to save on batteries. This is, of course, admitting that the function doesn’t work properly to begin with.
I tested the calculator. 2+2. The answer? Inexplicably, 2+2=1, until you realize that the plus and the division signs are rendered so as to be almost identical. I tried again and achieved the more usual answer of four. There’s a rumor on the street of an Orwell Edition which gives the answer five, although this is unsubstantiated.
Do I recommend this watch? Not really. I’d spring a little more and go for a more sturdy model, one which is perhaps water resistant, too. But it looks good, and despite the flaws it works perfectly as a timepiece. The final joke, though, is visible in tiny letters above the watch’s screen. Look closely and you’ll see the legend “10 Year Battery”. As if there would still be anything left to power in a decade’s time. $70.
Product page [Casio]
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