Hmm, I like that first one without numbers.
Didn’t want anything “clunky”, so something cheap lightweight like that would be nice.
I’ve considered one of these
Or maybe one of these for it’s step tracking capabilities
Anybody ever try one of them?
Unno, but I just ordered one of these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083N93F38/ for 10bux. Should arrive by, oh, June or so. (Well, March, or so they say.)
No idea how it works, no mention of it, hope it links to android phones (android wear or whatever).
But hey, for 10bux, if it has anything kewl in it, it might be worth it just for those functions, even if it snubs my phone entirely.
I’ve found that most watches on aliexpress are always going to be a disappointment up until around the 50USD level where you start to see some gems. But they’re just as hard to find and normally a bit stilted on the design side of things.
Overall, I’d recommend not getting into watches, theyre a bigger money sink than flashlights 
Cheapest chinese watch I bought was ~4€
This one
I like the overall looks, but the plastic dial looks very cheap
Also replaced the fake leather band with a cheap perlon one
Still working after 9 months, maybe I am lucky 
This will kill you then
€ 18,44 46％ Off | Big Diamond Luxury Brand Gold Watch Men Stainless Steel day-date Men’s WristWatch President Top Male Clock For relogio masculino
That is positively hideous.
Thanks for the recommendation. The MQ24-1B3 doesn’t have the same level of visible contrast but it’s in the ballpark of what I’m looking for here. Can a watch like that be used with Nato or Zulu bands?
Being from a trusted brand feels like it should matter. I wonder what the price of that watch would be if it was on AliExpress and didn’t say “Casio”. (Of course, going through Amazon Prime instead of Ali Express has its own benefits.)
I’ve known a few expats who work in “quality control” for major brands in Asia. They’ve told me that the knock-offs, store brands, and off-brands are sometimes made one belt over from the big brand names. The thing with cheap goods on AliExpress is that you usually won’t know unless you know someone with firsthand experience on a particular item. That’s part of why I’m grateful for this forum.
No idea, sorry. My son had a Casio digital watch that was even less expensive than that, and it had standard spring pins, so I suspect those will, but I don’t know for sure.
They most certainly are not. The watch market is booming.Granted, they’re not Swiss mecho-jobs, but, they are far more capable of gathering certain digital info, physio/body data so training plans can fine tune to your body’s past, present, and future performance parameters will be, infinitely more durable, and aside from Apple’s customary practice of taking 3rd rate gear and charging 1st rate prices……and then doubling that number to come up with what to charge consumers, they have become cheaper, but not fragile.
I use a Garmin 245 Forerunner. All of it’s gathering “thingies” work quite well and work perfectly and more accurately while running. It’s software that keeps up with your bodies’ energy levels and predicted performance is licensed from some company that created it….and when I did a double blind rigged test with the girlfriend manning it, the results were quite unsettling in a way I cant quite word. It was scarily accurate. Scaringly. And I don’t say that lightly.
But anyways, yeah, watches are pretty much skin-attached data collectors for mobile devices. The cloud takes care of data’s optimization, use, storage, and dispersion. Watches then have a beneficial secondary role of imitating a phone in order to retrieve, view, or otherwise engage data on the cloud (or the net)……but WITHOUT having to look at your phone a bajillion times because the less you pick up the phone, usually the more productive you can be in your present location and present time. Watches or souped up activity trackers: they do different things, but you can bet your butt, they ALL tell time.
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Newspapers are outdated and obselete, I totally agree. But watches man? Really?! That’s such a short-sighted and quite mean statement.
A watch that strictly tells time, and more specifically time of day is near impossible to find. Mechanical watches were obsolete for original intended use when quartz crystal came about.
Newspapers=obsolete.
Watches=NOT obsolete.
Why?
One is bottom of the barrel paper than quite literally can’t be recycled into paper again because of it’s super low quality. Ditto the inks. Ditto the news stories.
Watches, however, can and do deliver weather, your location if you’re a woman and worried about friends knowing where you are/intend to go workout/should be done with workout, or been in a fall, or you set off one of the other safety parameters. Shows who’s calling and I can answer and hang up through my garmin watch for my iphone control. Patches right through to headphones. Keeps up with my heart rate, respirtion, movement and sleep cycle, blood o2 level, and a bunch of other diagnostics like tempo, contact of each foot duration in milliseconds and the percentage of time on each foot (should be, but rarely is, exactly equal).
Hell, if anything, that large bricky-thing you got there being ‘a’ calleds a SELL-PHONE sounds (nearly) completely redundent of what my mid-level watch from a mid-level company offers. I assure you good sir, with the accuracy of data from the watch’s advantageous location, form factor, duration, and even more important, durability, devices will shrink and phones will eventually no longer vaguely reminisce of a handset reciever. Oh wait, they already aren’t “phones” in any sense of the original intended use of the device in question. Oh gee, whaddya know, we just had a monologue on why information is important, and form it is delivered in is important. But even still, what it’s delivered on is by far the most important thing, be it a head/brain implant, an amazing device that does wonders on your wrist, or as a phone so people can call and tell you, or one of the 4 OTA tv channels. See the way things will progress?
And the watch is 100% for fitness. Paired with the little pod that does stride length, gate, pace, duration of foot strike, etc., it’s impossible to tell you everything it does. It is NOT for decoration and being totally black it looks neither braggart nor dull. Big but small. Wide but thin. Dark but light. See where I’m goin?
In all honesty though, function and durability are the two top concerns and looks are a very distant third, and manufacturers are surprisingly frank and honest about this and why.
Watches are for people practicing self discipline to do things unknown to you, and there is no need to explain them even now. It’s not decoration. Or advertisement- commonly confused for decoration. The three identical flashlights in your profile picture with the same bodies but different primary colors with an overlaid watermark type imprint- that’s 100% decoration. And really it shouldn’t be just plain ol RGB, it should be RGBCY!!
I have bought a few , some good some not so good . After a while you end up on www.watchuseek.com and you spend lots and lots of money on watches. Most of which remain unworn locked away in a safe.
In order to break the habit you try to divert your attention and end up on this forum and end up buying enough flashlights ,batteries and chargers for the entire neighborhood .
We won’t talk about the Aliexpress knife addiction.
Haha. If it’s not one addiction hobby, it’s another!
I just ordered my first AliExpress watches during their 10th anniversary sale. I got a cheapo Curren for $4.50 and what should be a decent TwentySeventeen watch for $28. We’ll see how they pan out. I’ve been eyeing the latter one for a while, but I picked up the Curren just because of some crazy coupons.
I’d say mechanical watches - everything from Seiko 5s to JLC - are actually at the peak of their popularity since quartz became easily available and affordable despite being a fairly niche market.
Seiko went from having tons of quartz digitals in the 80s/90s to releasing increasingly more expensive versions of the same mech designs they’ve had for 30+ years… and when some sell out they go for well over retail on the used market.
Rolex used to be a fairly affordable entry-luxury brand, and is now selling the same steel sports watches for exponentially higher prices than the beginning of the millenium, IF you can even get on the waiting list due to their anti-consumer policies.
You’re seeing huge market penetration into normal retail outlets by Hamilton, Seiko, etc. and the “fashion watch” brands are following suit with their own mech models.
I know its kinda off topic for the thread but watches as an “accessory” and not just a functional object (more the domain of fitbits, smartwatches, Gshocks now) is definitely still the case, maybe even moreso since almost everyone does have a perfectly accurate clock in their pocket. …unless you’re outdoors away from reliable power sources for days at time where a watch is just as essential as a compass.
I have had decent luck with Guanqin mechanical watches. If you wear it everyday it doesn’t need any winding, but it will need to be reset/update the time occasionally because of the nature of a mechanical watch not being entirely accurate.
Get em a Timex. I’ve used and abused this one for years. Never changed the battery, keeps perfect time, lights up.
They’ll prolly still have it when they grow up. I paid around $30.
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I ordered a few analog quartz on Aliexpress some time ago, some of them aren’t bad for the price but the common thing that screams cheap watch is the greenish glass,i also have 2 nomos hommage from dhgate that are very decent for the money (around 10€)
That’s one thing I’m looking forward to on the TwentySeventeen watch - its supposed to have a sapphire crystal. It’ll be my first with sapphire. Stainless body. Japanese (Citizen) movement. Should be very thin (5.5mm) and light (I like lightweight watches - I have a bone disease in my wrists and heavy watches bother them badly).
This watch “died” since. Battery certainly. I’m not going to change it. I will now stick to Casio for cheap & good, reliable quartz watches.