Thursday, January 7, 2010

Casio Men's G-Shock Multi-Band Solar Atomic Analog Watch #AWG101-1A


I wanted a very accurate watch compared to my Omega & Tag Heuer (both automatics). While these watches may have the panache/legacy, this Casio beats them both in accuracy, and is available at a fraction of the cost. Infact, I used this watch to set my others.

This watch performs exceptionally well, and you'll be hard pressed to find a watch with this amount of technical innovation. Even the other models in the Casio line up, this offers one of most comprehensive sets of features for the price. It also is one of the few G-shocks/wave-ceptor models that offers 5-band world frequency reception. This is a big plus if you find yourself in the middle or southern part of Europe and would like to sync to an atomic clock in that area.

Some things to note: In order for the manual-receive function to successfully work the first time, it would help if you placed the watch under a lamp for the first 30min to 1 hr of its life out of the box. This will give a chance for the solar cells to charge the back up battery, and be able to sustain adequate reception. Secondly, reception is greatly improved at night as pointed out in the instruction manual. I often find that it's harder to get a sync manually during the day (even in an relatively open area), but at night between the hours of 12am to 6am, this watch will likely sync without issue. This watch displays the actual time/date that the last successful sync was performed.

If I could write to the designers of this watch and could add/change some items about it (because I'm a sick perfectionist):

I would be great if Casio made this watch in a steel or titanium band, I would pay more just for the better look/durability of metal.

While adequately large, if the face of this watch was even slightly larger, and descriptive words/markings on the dial more spread out (or even some eliminated), this watch might exude the look of a higher quality watch - but thats just my opinion, the watch looks fine the way it is.

A second hand would be also great. Even though the seconds are displayed on the LCD recessed vial.

I wish the round sunken vial info area that displays a toggled view of date/day/time was moved to another location. It is currently at the 9 o'clock position, and is hard to read when the watch hand is in the 9 o'clock. Since most people look at the date at the start of the work day (i.e. 9am) its hard to tell the date until the hour hand moves off that position. The date should ideally be displayed at 3'oclock or 6'o clock position. I speculate that most people world wide would be less concerned about the date, when the time is either 3 or 6 am/pm around the world and the hour hand sits directly over it, as opposed to 9am/pm.

The 6 o'clock position vial does not indicate much info, more info should have been allocated here, and as such the display font through out could have been made larger, and more legible. If there was a way to shift or move the info around to where we would like it displayed, that would be a killer feature.

Overall this is a great watch, don't let anything stop you from getting it - you will be very content.
Buy Casio Men's G-Shock Multi-Band Solar Atomic Analog Watch #AWG101-1A!